


Take Up Dancing to Forget

by Nell65



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-04-25 23:04:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14388978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: Post S4/S5My take on a reunion fic between Clarke and Team Space. AU/AR.Written to suit my own preferences. So, first twist, Roan lives. Second twist, daring to hope for the future. Everything else spins out from these two. :-) Also, my first attempt at foregrounding Bellarke. In like, a long, long time. Ever, maybe?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has taken a lot of drafts and a lot of long meta discussions, even some writing theory, to pull the story - which was very clear in my head - out of my head and get it into to words that could be read by others. Jeanie did a lot of the heavy lifting here, pushing and prodding me to make what I wrote match what I told her I planned to write. Without her... this woud be very different. And not nearly so much what I hoped to achieve.

Breath rasped in her throat, her oxygen-starved lungs burned, her shins ached with every pounding stride.

 _Madi_.

Clarke tucked her chin, forced her clenched fists flat, and pumped her arms harder.

 _Madi_.

She swerved around clumps of new saplings. Leapt over fallen logs. Ducked out of the way of low-hanging branches. She stumbled up eroded embankments, hauling herself up by exposed tree roots. Slipped and slid down the other side, arms flailing to keep her balance. Found her pace again in the shallow vales, and raced on.

Squirrels fled in alarm from her passage, skittering loudly up the rough bark of the trees. Wind rustled through the pines. The piercing skree of a distant hawk echoed high above.

 _Madi_.

The comforting weight of her hunting knife dragged on her belt, its ties pulling tight, squeezing her thigh with every stride. Her gun bounced against her back, a reminder of her purpose, and a promise of her reward.

She smelled rain in the damp air brushing against her cheeks, and she tasted the bitter dust of the leaves grinding under foot on her tongue. Fine strands of hair blew in the edges of her eyes and caught in the corners of her mouth.

She swiped them impatiently away without slowing. Forced her vision to telescope and tunnel. Refocused on the ground ahead of her. Blocked out the sounds and the smells and the tastes. Concentrated on the name. A chant. A prayer. A promise.

 _Madi_.

Just twelve years old. Her responsibility. Her charge. Her tiny found family. Her heart. Hardly more than a child. There one instant, safe in her hidden aerie. Watching their unwanted and unwelcome arrivals from the prison colony.

In the next, gone. Grabbed. Taken. _Stolen_.

A horrible gaping _emptiness_ yawning where Madi’s cheerful little radio voice ought to have been. It swept over Clarke, swallowing her up, drowning her, tossing her on its current, turning the blood to ice in her veins. Trapping her screams inside her chest. Closing off her throat. Threatening to stop her breath.

Then came the rage. Needles of rage so cold they’d burned erupting between her bones. Slicing under her skin. Caging the frantic beating of her heart. Lifting her from despair and launching her to her feet.

How _dare_ they?

 _Weapons_ , she’d thought. She’d get her weapons. Her guns. Her knives. Her incendiaries. The gunpowder and bullets she’d been carefully stockpiling these last six years.

Then she’d teach these strangers not to touch her world. Not to touch her daughter. Not to touch anything, anything at all, ever again.

She’d rain her arctic fury down on these… these _interlopers_. These _thieves_. These convicts. These _human scum_ who’d drifted onto her land, defiling it with every step they took, every tree they bent. Every daughter they seized.

And she would take back what was hers and then she would burn the rest to ash and then she would scatter them to the wind.

A faint path was visible to her now, worn into the forest floor by her feet and Madi’s as they travelled this part of the Green. _Their_ part. Their _home_. Where these strangers _did not belong_.

Clarke let her mind drift in the familiar stretch of forest, just a bit. Started to plan for what she could carry. How she would place it. What she would **_do_** with it.

A buzz of anticipation ran up her spine, poured a little more raw energy into her heart and lungs. She pictured the doors of the ship ripping inwards, torn open by the satisfying force of her rage. Starburst explosions burst behind her eyes, flames reaching for the sky. She grinned exultantly into the wind, swelling with desire. An answering thrill pulsed in her palms and ran down her legs.

The sound of something crashing through the trees towards her brought her to a lurching halt.

Her heart hammering in her throat, her consciousness hurtled back into the moment.

She whirled to get a tree to her back, clawing for her rifle. She raised her gun, scanning the trees, avid, eager, _hungry_ to take down every last son of a bitch who stood between her and hers. Starting with this very first one.

A man burst out of the forest and onto the narrow trail, barely a dozen feet ahead of her.

Clarke swung toward the sound, got his torso framed in her crosshairs.

He waved his hands high and called out, “Clarke! Whoa! Hey! Drop your gun!”

Clarke knew that voice. Knew his face.

Relief and adrenaline and shock slammed into each other so hard that her arms and legs started to shake. The tree behind her served as much for support as cover now.

She eased her gun arm into her side, let her body hide the trembling in her grip. “Roan?”

How the fuck did he do that? Know when she needed him most? How could he have gotten here so fast from however many hundreds of miles the hell away he’d been?

And then another figure spilled out of the woods and skidded to a stop behind Roan, yanking off his hood to utter a glad cry, “Clarke!”

Clarke blinked. And blinked again. And still he was there.

Her voice fainter than before, still doubting her own eyes, she breathed his name. “Monty?”

A wide grin was spreading across the familiar face. His hair shorter, bones more prominent even as his face was fuller now, a man grown, tall and strong, and not a boy. Monty Green.

Honest to God, Monty Green was standing on the path in Clarke’s own woods. He was half-laughing with joy as he repeated, “Clarke! We found you!”

Clarke blinked again, because a third figure had slipped out of the forest to stand with Monty and Roan. A man she’d dreamed of and spoken to for 2199 days.

Now, here he was. Same broad, sloping shoulders and heavily muscled arms, same slim waist, same wide stance. He still favored a quilted jacket and fatigues tucked into his laced-up boots. He was a little older now, and a little shaggier. His hair was longer than before and he’d grown out a soft dark beard, covering his chin and his jaw, and hiding his full lips.

Bellamy.

He was here.

Right here.

On Earth, on the ground, at last. Standing firm and tall, his booted feet planted solidly on the path in front of her.

Her fingers clutching her gun so tightly to her chest they hurt, Clarke raised her eyes to his face. Her voice was so dry and fragile it cracked when she whispered his name. “Bellamy?”

“Hey, Clarke.”

His voice was the same. Gentle and deep. So was his smile. So were his eyes. Warm. Kind. Full of strength. And full of worry.

Clarke wondered if she could move. If she could put one foot in front of the next. If she could draw closer. If she could reach out and touch him, just to reassure herself that she wasn’t dreaming, that he was really there. That he was really **_here_** , right in her path.

“Clarke!” Roan’s impatient growl cracked the spell. “Why are you running? Why are you armed? _Where’s Madi_?”

Time sped back up, the hammering of her heart catching in her throat. Making her ribs ache. “Guns,” Clarke wheezed.

She pushed herself off and away from the tree trunk, and back to her feet, a fresh burst of adrenaline surging through her limbs.

She refocused on her daughter, her weapons, her plans.

 _Madi_.

Her words nearly tripping on her own tongue in her urgency she gasped, “Guns! I need my guns. They took Madi! She was watching them and now she’s gone and they took her and I need to get her back!”

“The people from that ship? The _Eligius_?” Bellamy asked. “The one that landed two days ago?”

“Yes, exactly!” Clarke nodded vigorously. Then she frowned, questions finally catching up with her brain and spilling out of her mouth. “How did you know? Where did you come from? How did you find Roan? Where’s everyone else?”

“We saw it come in,” Bellamy told her. “We were headed here, but we were still too far away, and on foot.”

“You’re late!” she burst out angrily. “By a year! I was afraid you were dead!”

She wrenched her eyes away from Bellamy’s stricken face to take in Monty’s equally guilt-ridden countenance, “All of you! I was afraid all of you were dead!”

“No!” Bellamy shook his head, his hands half-raised as though he would have reached out to touch her, if he stood closer, if she hadn’t held a gun between them. He dropped his hands. “No. We’re definitely not dead.” He tried for a small smile, but he couldn’t hold her gaze and it faded. “It just took a lot longer to prepare our landing ship than we’d hoped.”

He exchanged a guilty glance with Monty.

Clarke looked back and forth between them, awareness prickling at the back of her neck. There was something they weren’t telling her. She wasn’t sure how she knew, what quirk of their lips, what lines of guilt by their eyes gave them away, but it had.

It made her angrier and sadder and more anxious, all at once.

The moment lasted barely an instant and then they were both looking at Clarke again. Monty raised his hand, his thumb and index finger held just a centimeter apart. “Just a little.”

Then Monty tried on a game smile. “We’re really sorry, and we’re here now!”

His smile didn’t make a difference. It couldn’t penetrate her cold. She wouldn’t let it.

Her daughter was all that mattered right now.

 _Madi_.

“I know we're later than we planned,” Bellamy said. His expression was tight with regret and frustration and something else Clarke couldn't name. “We expected you’d be in Polis. With everyone else from the bunker.”

“You… expected me?”

“Yes!” Monty was nodding again, another broad smile on his face, this one relaxed and genuine. “Of course!”

“You heard me?” Hope and excitement and relief surged through Clarke, lifting her up, almost literally. Despite all her rage, and her panic, and her fears, she smiled at them both. If they’d heard her then maybe, just maybe, the world would finally be on her side in a catastrophe after all. “You got all my messages? I knew you had to think that I was dead and I didn’t want you to worry about me…”

“No.” Bellamy cut her off, his eyes and his voice both full of regret, “No. I’m sorry. Roan told us you’ve been trying all this time, but no.”

Clarke’s tentative optimism deflated, and her grin faded away.

“Then,” Clarke was thoroughly puzzled now, “how did you know to expect me?”

“We just decided.” Bellamy gestured vaguely, at himself and Monty and off to the west, obviously including the rest of the missing members of Team Space in that ‘we.’ He met her eyes again and firmed up his shoulders. “All of us did. To choose hope. To choose to believe in you.”

“It was Emori who kept insisting it was possible, at first,” Monty explained. “She kept pushing. So we talked it all out, and we thought, why the fuck not? You know? You’re Clarke fucking Griffin. You saved our lives. If anyone could walk off the apocalypse, why not you?”

“If we were wrong, we knew there’d be plenty of time to mourn later,” Bellamy added. “In the meantime, we chose to believe in you. And here you are.”

His smile was soft this time, and warm and proud. She felt it was just for her.

Clarke’s optimism returned. Maybe not with a rush, but more than a trickle. She was aware of a glow, right inside the middle of her chest, beginning to melt through all the ice around her heart.

They’d chosen hope. For her. Bellamy had chosen to believe in her. For six years, he’d believed. Despite never hearing a single word of any one of her 2199 individual radio broadcasts.

Just as she’d chosen to believe in him. In them. All of them. In Raven and Monty. In Murphy and Emori and Harper. Even in Echo, a warrior of surprising adaptability and determination. They’d believed in each other and they’d been right and they were all alive. She hoped they were all alive.

She realized she was hugging her rifle, still cradled in her arms, and beaming at him, at them both, beaming so hard it was making her cheeks hurt.

“We did spot the _Eligius_ , though,” Monty said.

Clarke’s spirits plummeted back to a cold knot in her gut.

The fucking _Eligius_. The monsters who’d stolen Madi.

“We still had the deep space arrays, fixed on the outer rim,” he said. “We’ve been tracking the _Eligius_ for a while. Knew they were headed for Earth. We’ve been trying to get to you before they did.”

Clarke slung her rifle on her back, the radio silence where Madi should have been reaching out to suck her back into the cold. “Yeah. Well, you didn’t get here in time. Come on. We need weapons.”

She turned for the path, reaching for her rage, refocusing on her plans, on her dreams of fury and retribution, of finding her daughter and destroying those who had dared to touch her.

Explosions were already filling her head when Roan fell in just behind her.

“What’s happened to Madi?” he demanded again, his voice tight with frustration.

Clarke spun on her heal to glare at him in disbelief, swamped by a wave of resentful fury that she had to repeat herself. Enunciating very slowly because he clearly hadn’t understood her the first time, she explained. “I told you! She was watching them. They must have spotted her, and they’ve taken her!”

She turned, abruptly dismissing all three of them. Not a help. Just a temporary distraction. Her eyes on the trail, concentrating on images of Madi’s face, of the doors of the _Eligius_ exploding inward, she said, “I’m going to get her back. And then I’m going to blow those fuckers into the sky. Help me or get the fuck out of my way.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Roan snapped, his voice at her shoulder, his steps tracking hers.

His hovering, his complaints, his familiar growl, all of it sending another wave of fury roaring up her spine.

She snarled, “Why do you always argue with me?”

“Because you always run off with the first idea you get in your head. You never stop to think, and you push things from bad to worse, that’s why.” His hand fell heavily on her shoulder, wrenching her around to face him. “Tell me what the fuck has happened to Madi!”

Clarke lashed out instantly, swinging up her own arm to knock his hand away. She followed up with a stiff-fingered cross with her free hand, one aimed directly for his throat.

Which he anticipated, because he’d taught her that sequence. He was already spinning out of her reach, her blow sliding uselessly along his shoulder as he came around her back and shoved her hard across his extended foot.

She didn’t fall, but by the time she’d caught her balance and turned to face him he’d retreated again.

He was standing just out of reach, his hands open and raised, an expression of shock and dismay on his face.

“Clarke! Whoa. Talk to me.” He was clearly making an effort to speak quietly. Calmly. “Talk to us. Start at the beginning.”

Clarke glared at him, almost shaking from the effort of not hurling herself at his stupid, condescending face, to claw at his eyes and tear at his hair. Then she saw Bellamy and Monty. Really saw them.

She’d actually, for those few heartbeats, forgotten that they were there. That they’d come back. That they’d come for her. That it wasn’t just her and Madi and Roan, and these new invaders from the sky.

Bellamy and Monty looked shocked and concerned and utterly bewildered.

Six years gone and they had come back into this, her very worst day of those entire six years. If she’d had the time she would have raged at the sky.

Clarke gulped back all the clashing furies and fears piling up in her chest, and spat out at Roan, “I keep telling you! They took her!”

Roan slashed his arms through the air, his voice dropping as he ground out, “That. Is not. The beginning!”

Clarke opened her mouth to respond, but Bellamy was quicker.

“Clarke, please. Bring us all up to speed? They landed… and then, what happened? Why are you watching them without making contact? Why do you think they’d hurt a child?”

A small part of Clarke, quickly walled off from everything else, was wailing. _Why now? Why did he have to arrive at this particular moment, to find her when she had no time to give to him, not the way she’d always imagined that she would?_

“Yeah,” Monty added quickly. “We’re here now, Clarke. We’ll do whatever it takes to find your kid. But we’ll make a better plan if we have all the data. Okay?”

Clarke swung her head to look between them. Saw their concerned eyes and worried faces. Grasped instantly that she must be coming off like one of the wailing mothers of fairy tales, driven to insanity by the hunt for her lost children. She jerked a quick nod.

She’d have to get them on her side, she realized, or get away from them, or they’d just interfere. She recognized that Roan, the condescending bastard, was right. Madi’s life depended on her thinking clearly and well, and not hurling herself headlong into the first plan that came into her head.

At the thought of Madi, desperate and alone and trapped by thieves, a wave of fresh panic nearly swamped everything else, drowning out all the other noise. Clarke ordered herself to get a fucking grip. To make an offer they wouldn’t refuse.

“I will tell you everything. As soon as we get to my weapons cache. We’re close. I promise. Deal?”

The three men exchanged quick looks, which irritated the fuck right out of her. Roan nodded at the other two men, assuring them she was telling the truth. Clarke thought briefly about shooting all three of them on the spot. But then they all looked back to her and nodded, accepting her terms. Just in time to save their fucking lives. Or at least their knees.

Congratulating herself on not shooting them, Clarke turned to lead the way. She also began to run again. The pause had given her time to get her breath back. Let them keep up with her. If they could.

 _Madi_.

~~~~

Clarke ripped away the vines and bracken, cultivated to cover the entrance to the old cellar that served as her armory.

Roan shouldered the heavy door open, hefting it up so it didn’t drag so deeply on the old cement floor. With the flat afternoon light spilling down the steps, she led Bellamy and Monty into her storehouse.

Before they could finish exclaiming in wonder and praise, Clarke interrupted to tell them to pick what they wanted. Time was wasting, and she was in a hurry. They could sing her praises as a collector later.

Bellamy went straight for a short-barreled semi automatic rifle, twin to the one he’d left behind on Earth six years ago. Clarke had thought of him immediately when she’d found it. She’d remembered him caring meticulously for his own weapon as she’d oiled this one up and put it into storage. She told herself she was absolutely pleased that he should have picked it straightaway. And that she was not in the least bit jealous of the way he ran his hands lovingly across the weapon’s slick barrel and heavy stock.

Because that would be fucking ridiculous and she was not a ridiculous woman.

Bellamy looked up from the rifle in his hands and caught her watching him. “This is amazing,” he grinned. “How did you find it?”

“Poking around the ruins of Arkadia. Years ago.”

He looked back at the weapon, a faint smile on his lips and concentration in his eyes, deftly pulling it apart to check the barrel for debris.

She stomped up the stairs, her arms full of her own cache of grenades and a small rocket launcher, calling out, “Come up when you have what you need. I’ll go over my plan then.”

Clarke dropped rocks into place as she spoke. “Here is their ship. They’ve added some outbuildings since they landed, tents mostly, a few structures built from what look like prefab materials. I think at least one of them is a clinic. A lot of them seem to be ill. Weak with radiation sickness maybe. They have fixed watch positions here, and here. And they look in. Not out.”

“Where’s the tree line?” Bellamy asked.

“Here,” Clarke arranged some twigs, glaring at him in irritation for the interruption. “I’m certain I can move from here,” she pointed, “to here,” she moved her finger. “From there I’ll be able to make it to the main door, here.”

“If that’s the plan, why not from here?” Roan traced out an alternate route.

Clarke explained, dropping more pebbles and twigs, making the map more complicated. Bellamy and Roan added more questions and objections. She dropped more twigs. More pebbles. Her route grew more complicated. More risky.

And Roan kept circling back to what proof did she have that Madi was even inside the prison transport in the first place, and not in one of the outbuildings. Or in a different location altogether.

She explained, or tried to, in between their many interruptions, that it was clear to her from their spying that the crew was splitting into factions. Fighting with each other over resources. Over command and control.

“So a hostage,” she explained, for what was surely the fourth or fifth time, “from the ground could be a huge asset to whichever group brought her in, and the transport itself is clearly the most secure location!”

The longer they carried on, the worse Clarke felt. Her icy fury rolled back, and with it a vague nausea. She sank deeper into her heels and rubbed at her temples, pressing hard against the throbbing in her head. It was un-fucking-believable. After yearning for their company for so long she thought she’d permanently bent herself around the shape of their absence, now that she had them in front of her, she wanted nothing more than to wish away the dull rumble of men’s voices.

Blast them all the hell back into space and far the fuck away from her.

She opened her eyes. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!” Her voice rose as her control of her temper frayed and broke. “All of you. Madi is my daughter. My responsibility. We are wasting time. We go with my plan.”

All three men stopped, stared, and then immediately started talking again. At once. Then stopped all at once.

“No.” Roan rose to his feet, his thumbs hooked in his belt as he stared down at her. “It’s a bad plan, Clarke. And you know it’s a bad plan. Let it go.”

“Bellamy?” Clarke turned to him. Surely he would support her. Surely the man who opened the bunker door, while staring down the barrel of her gun, no matter what the cost to themselves or to their people, and all to find his sister, would understand.

The man staring back at her was agonizingly familiar. The warm steady presence she’d held in her head and her heart for years. Who’d kept her as sane as she could be as she spilled her fears and her hopes and her dreams to him in her daily radio broadcast.

He was also, in this moment, a complete stranger. Shuttered, sure of himself, his true thoughts hidden entirely from her.

He rose to his feet and shook his head at her, turning her down. “No. Roan’s right. I agree. It’s a bad plan.”

Telling herself that Bellamy’s rejection didn’t slice her to the bone and there could be no pain from a phantom blow that hadn’t even fallen, she glared up at Roan.

“If my plan’s so bad,” she challenged him. “You’ve got one that’s better?”

Roan nodded warily. “Yes. Your plan is worth the risk _only if they have her_. We don’t yet know that they do. Madi’s smart. She’s been hiding at the first sign of danger all her life, and she’s alive now because of it. Her parents hid her from the natblida hunters. They hid her from the fires and the radiation. That’s why she survived long enough for you to rescue her.”

Clarke drew in her breath to interrupt, because who cared what people long dead had taught Madi about hiding from priests? But Roan sank back down again, bringing his eyes level with hers. “You improved her skills. And I then taught her all I know. She’s very good at it now.”

Roan’s expression was open and earnest and sincere and Clarke momentarily hated him for it. Because he was telling her what she already knew to be true. Madi had quickly learned all the earth skills Clarke could teach her, and then she’d turned to Roan and absorbed everything he shared with her with an ease that had delighted and amazed him.

“I think we should start with the assumption she did exactly what she’s been trained to do,” Roan continued, his eyes locked on Clarke’s face. “That something spooked her. That she’s hiding. Including going radio-silent. Which is _exactly what you told her do_ in this situation. Have faith in what you’ve taught her, Clarke. Have faith in her.”

Clarke scowled. Unwilling to concede. Unwilling to risk that he could be right. Terrified of the fragile hope already rising in her chest, beating at the frozen cage around her heart.

“It would be nice,” Bellamy jumped back in, “to have our first encounter with these new people NOT be an unprovoked attack by us. Think, Clarke. How could things have been different, been so much better, if Trikru had walked up and said, ‘hello’ instead of starting with a spear in Jasper’s chest?”

“I don’t really give a shit about the Trikru, right now, Bellamy,” Clarke snapped. “That’s all ancient history. Madi is all I’m worried about today.”

“Clarke!” Bellamy sounded shocked. And terribly disapproving. “This world is in desperate need of people. Humans are the most fragile, and most valuable, resource there is! And here is a whole new ship full of them. We can’t just start killing indiscriminately what few we have left, or what little chance humanity has left is gone for good.”

“And if they do have her?” Clarke demanded, not in the slightest bit interested in these grander diplomatic or strategic concerns. Not if the _Eligius_ crew had Madi. And people? As a resource? What in the hell was Bellamy talking about? People, strangers, were dangerous. Everything that had ever happened to her on Earth had driven that lesson home, time and time again.

“Then we take her back, with whatever force is necessary,” Bellamy replied, raking his hair back out of his eyes, frustration in every line of his face. “But let’s not start there! Please! Listen to Roan if you won’t listen to me.”

Clarke took a deep breath, and then another, blowing them out slowly and forcing her shoulders down. She’d promised herself, over and over, so many times, that she would do a better job of listening. That once she was reunited with her people, reunited with Bellamy, that she would stop assuming that she had to do everything alone.

Every instinct she had was screaming at her to stand up. Tell the men to go fuck themselves. Tell them that if they wouldn’t help she’d do it herself.

These were exactly the instincts she was not going to let control her. She would control them. Consider all the angles before she went careening off a cliff. Got anyone killed. Or started an unnecessary war. Or wasted any valuable _resources_.

She side-eyed Bellamy at this thought. He was watching her, his expression wary. She turned away from him.

She would do as he suggested. As she knew she ought to do. She would listen to Roan. She knew Roan loved Madi nearly as much as she did. Knew that in some ways he understood her far better than Clarke ever would. When it came to Madi’s skills, his judgment was superior to hers, and she should respect that.

She did respect that.

If he thought Madi had the smarts and the skill to hide from invaders like these, she would listen to him.

“But,” Clarke narrowed her eyes at the men watching her, “what if they have equipment to track her? Or us?”

“Then we have an entirely different set of problems on our hands,” Bellamy said. “Because if they have that, then your plan won’t work either.”

“But nothing indicates that they do,” Monty reminded them. “Or they’d simply have come to you the minute they stepped outside their ship, right? Assuming, of course, they wanted to say ‘Hi’.”

“Or threaten you,” Roan pointed out. “Once they grabbed Madi. But they haven’t approached you at all, either way?”

Clarke let a little fragile hope take flight. “No. They haven’t.”

“Good. We go with Roan’s plan.” Bellamy leaned down and scooped up his rifle, six years falling away as he moved. Effortlessly taking command of their little group as he straightened up. “Let’s go find your daughter. Bring her home safely. And avoid a war if we can.”

Clarke’s breath caught as memories of another time and another place nearly blinded her. Seven years ago at the drop ship, Bellamy had taken one hundred frightened teenagers and molded them into a community.

“Monty and I can get eyes on the transport ship. I want to see them up close myself.” Bellamy nodded at Clarke. “You and Roan should scout out Madi’s last location. Then the two of you, who know her best, who know this place best, you find and track her trail, find where she might be hiding. Or you’ll see sign of her being grabbed. This environment will be entirely new to these people. They won’t move around the forest without leaving plenty of evidence for the two of you to see.”

“It will be dark in a few hours.” Bellamy held out his hand to Clarke. “We should move out.”

After a painful heartbeat of searching his face, wondering for a terrible moment if this was all some sort of a waking dream that would burst if she touched him, Clarke took it. Let him pull her to her feet.

It wasn’t a dream and he didn’t vanish like a popped soap bubble. Clarke was so relieved she flung her arms around his shoulders and hugged him. He was real. He was solid. So solid. And his body was so warm. She remembered that, from before. He was a human furnace. She wanted to burrow in and stay for a time.

He was clearly too startled at first to respond, but once he recovered, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in. Clarke closed her eyes and let time stop, just for a moment, while they held each other close.

“Locate Madi’s trail,” he said, his hands on her arms and his eyes on her face when she stepped back, her fears for Madi pulling her away from the brief refuge of Bellamy’s embrace. “Hopefully locate her. Monty and I will see if we can’t get a read on the _Eligius_ crew. We meet back here three hours after full dark, no matter what. Okay?”

“Three hours after full dark,” Roan repeated, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and turned for the path.

But Clarke, her eyes still caught in Bellamy’s, didn’t move. “Bellamy? Are you sure you and Monty are up to this? Six years is a long time. You get rusty.”

“And we did. But we landed,” he dropped his hands, stepping back and glancing at Monty, “twenty days ago?”

Monty nodded.

“Roan found us four days after that. We’ve had time to remember. Get our bearings again. We can do this. Though I’m really glad to have your guns.” Bellamy smiled crookedly at her. “Never did get much good with a bow, no matter how hard Echo worked on teaching me.” He sobered again. “We’ll see you three hours after dark. I promise.”

Clarke’s throat constricted and she couldn’t do more than nod.

“And Clarke,” he added softly, “It’s really, really good to see you.”

She smiled, a little tremulously, “It’s good to see you, too.”

“My turn,” Monty said, approaching her with a quicksilver smile. He hugged Clarke fiercely, before collecting his weapon and nodding at Bellamy. They turned and disappeared down the trail.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Madi is lost, Roan is storming away, strangers have landed, and Bellamy wants to meet them. If Clarke could have found Earth to punch her in the throat, she would have.

Roan had already nearly vanished along a bend in the opposite direction. Clarke sped up to catch him. “Twenty days ago? Why the hell didn’t you come straight here?” she snapped.

“Nice to see you, too,” he grunted, without slowing or pausing or even turning his head.

She took a deep breath, blew it out along with another wave of anger, and tried again, more calmly. “Where were you?”

That earned her a partial head turn and a ghost of a smile.

“In the mountains.”

Clarke nodded. Of course he was. Roan spent much of the time he wasn’t in the Green with her and Madi in the mountains. He preferred the high peaks that stretched south and west of the ruins of Mt. Weather. He liked the view of the horizons, and the closeness of the night sky.

She wasn’t the only one who’d spent six years longing for the return of those who’d fled to space.

Roan and Raven had stumbled into a love affair sometime between the triumph over ALIE in Polis and Clarke and Roan’s departure from Becca’s Island. The affair had been well and truly launched before Clarke was even aware of it, and long before she could try to put a stop to it. When she had figured it out, she’d warned them both it was a terrible idea and begged them to end it before someone got hurt.

Raven had told her to float herself.

Roan had done that irritating thing of his where he stared quietly for a moment while dramatically telegraphing that he was nobly enduring the stupidest person he’d ever met in his entire life. Then he’d leaned across the lab bench where Raven was working and kissed her. Thoroughly. Erotically. And for an unnecessarily long time.

Murphy had wolf-whistled. Emori had applauded. Luna had laughed. Clarke had flushed blotchily. Something she knew because the lab was entirely too full of reflective surfaces.

And then their affair had become something more than that. Raven wasn’t merely Roan’s long-lost lover. She’d also become his savior.

When Clarke had decided to test the new serum Abby had made from Luna’s bone marrow on herself rather subject Emori to it’s unknown limits, and while everyone else had been staring astounded at her while Clarke had emptied the syringe into her own vein, Raven had snatched up the second and only remaining dose and then driven it into Roan’s shoulder.

“He’s the king,” she’d snapped, as they’d all stared at her making vague sounds of disbelief. “He’s the king. He’s the commander. If anyone else gets to be turned into a nightblood, it should fucking well be him.”

Later, after everything had spun so out of control at the end… he’d had no way to tell anyone that the serum had worked. That he’d survived Luna’s blows, survived the acid rain, survived the radiation storm in Polis. And so he’d had no chance to say good-bye.

Instead, like Clarke, he’d watched the stars and waited.

“I was looking east at sunset,” he was telling her now as they hurried along the narrow path, “in the quadrant of the sky where Raven showed me how to see the remains of the Ark. I saw their vapor trail lit up by the setting sun. At first I thought I had to be conjuring it from nothing more than hope and dreams. But I finally accepted it was real. That they were really headed in not far from the western pass to Azgeda, coming down near the lake.”

“Why did they land so far away?” Clarke asked, utterly baffled by that destination.

“From their perspective it seemed a good choice. They thought everyone would be out of the bunker by now, and that’s the closest large body of fresh water to the remains of Polis. And there’s green there, by the shore. Maybe enough for some farming...”

“No! There isn’t!” Clarke cut him off. She could not believe that Roan’s persistent delusion about life returning outside the Green was rearing its ugly head, here and now, with Madi’s life on the line.

He’d spent the last two years swearing that life was coming back in the hollows and the valleys along the eastern edge of the mountains. That plants were beginning to grow again along streambeds and beside old culverts under broken bridges.

Clarke believed isolation and loneliness and despair were driving them both more than a bit mad. Just as she’d sometimes convinced herself she heard static on the radio she used to speak to Bellamy, she knew Roan saw green where there was only damp from the endless winter rains.

“Yes.” His equally longstanding exasperation with her disbelief rumbled through his gritted teeth. “There is! Not nearly as large a green as this, but it’s coming back even faster than I told you it was a year ago. But since you never listen when I tell you things…”

“Yes, I do!”

“No, you don’t. Not without a long argument about it first…”

“I looked everywhere…”

“Three years ago! Three years ago you drove around in the Rover, and you didn’t even go into the high mountains or into the western pass.”

“ALIE said four percent,” she retorted, anger at this old debate rearing its head temporarily driving nearly everything else out of her brain.

How dared he? How dared he do this to her now? While Madi was missing?

He lengthened his strides, forcing her to jog to keep up, and slashed his hand through the air. “Again with the fucking computer!”

“Computers know more than people!”

“The computers that told you no one on earth survived the first cataclysm? That Mount Weather was empty? That the whole world was yours for the taking?”

“They’re only as good as the data…!”

Clarke felt as much as heard her own voice getting louder as the familiar lines of their too-often-rehashed dispute spilled out of her mouth.

He interrupted, right on cue. “The data that said that the cataclysm was caused by governments, not a rogue computer that gained consciousness and then decided to murder all the people? The data that said the earth was dead?”

“ALIE had better data!”

“The computer that had you trapped in a fever dream and was trying to convince you not to kill it? That computer?”

Clarke ground out, exactly as she’d ground out every other time, “It was a mental matrix.”

“It lied to you about basic things. It said it wanted to save people. It murdered them. It said it wanted to make people happy. It was a living tomb. It told you we had six months. We barely had three. Luna’s people had even less than that.”

He stopped so abruptly, spinning around to face her, that Clarke nearly collided with him.

“But you still believe it over me, what I tell you what I see with my own two eyes, touch with my own hands, describe living earth I walk over with my own feet. You call me a liar to my face rather than disbelieve the fucking computer. What the fuck will it take to shake your faith in those machines?” He kept his volume low, but his voice was actually going high and tight in the struggle.

“This is the only real green left! So what if moss or fungus is coming back in a few places? Humans need grass and trees and crops! Why are we even talking about this right now?” Her neck muscles ached from the strain of keeping her furious yells contained at near whisper.

“Grass and trees are coming back!” He was whisper-shouting too. “Some of them never died in the first place!”

She whisper-yelled, “You’re dreaming it! You’re seeing what you wish were true! Not what’s really there!”

He froze for moment, his eyes bulging as he glared at her, his teeth actually bared for a fight. Then he leaned back and shook himself out. Turning to stomp away up the trail, he tossed out, “Right. Because the whole fucking universe revolves around you, Wanheda.”

Warning sirens started blaring in the back of Clarke’s brain.

_Wanheda_.

That was a name Roan dredged up out of the past only when he really wanted to knock her off balance, really wanted to lash out…

“Excuse me?” she said.

He spun to face her again. “You really think you’re so special that the only green left on the entire fucking planet is the green you happened to be stranded right next to? There’s a whole fucking world out there and you’ve barely even been west of the eastern mountains on this continent! But no, all the green left on this entire godless rock happens to be under your two feet and all of it belongs to you?”

Clarke rocked a step back, shocked to her core at this new line of attack.

The change of perspective was enough for her to really see him. His shoulders were rolled high, his big hands loosely fisted, his head thrust forward, his jaw rigid, and his eyes so narrow and dark she could barely see any blue at all.

He was practically vibrating he was strung so tight. Like one of his bowstrings – which she couldn’t even attach, much less pull. Like he was just waiting for an excuse to punch something. Anything. Anyone. Anyone at all. Even her.

Everything inside her went quiet and still. High alert. She could actually feel her temper draining away while the gears in her head frantically clicked through information and data.

“This is unusually combative,” she said slowly. “Even for you. Even worried about Madi. What’s going on?”

He yanked his head back as his eyes widened. Then he dropped his eyes and looked away. Masking whatever emotions she would have seen there. But the lines between his brows deepened.

“Roan?” she asked, forcing a gentler tone.

After a long pause he said, “There’s something they’re not telling me about Raven.”

“What aren’t they telling you?”

He rolled his head to one side to stare at her from under his brows, the expression on his face strongly suggesting that he was pondering exactly how big a hat he could make from her hide once he’d skinned her dead body.

“Right.” Clarke forced the tension in her jaw to let go. “Stupid question. I meant, what’s giving you that feeling?”

With a sick twist in her gut, she recalled her own sense that Bellamy and Monty were holding something back. Something about their ship and the time it took to build it, about their delay in returning to the ground.

“They’re just…” he floundered, “what did you used to say about Madi, when she was little and keeping a secret? That she was being…” he frowned, then his face lightened for a fraction of a second as he remembered, “squirrelly?”

Clarke’s lips twitched as she recalled the exact expression on Madi’s face. “Yeah,” she said, her voice shaking a bit, “squirrelly.”

“They’re just… squirrelly when I ask about her. They tell me she’s fine. She’s healthy, but…” He broke off, scowling furiously.

“Tell me everything, about how you found them,” she begged, her voice nearly breaking. “We’ve been waiting so long.”

He paused, considering, but then he shook his head, raising his eyes to hers. “Madi first. Right?”

Clarke felt like she might just shatter into a million pieces. She heard the hysteria whipping along the edge of her voice when she said, “Yes. Right.”

He reached out and wrapped his hand around the back of her head and pulled her close. With his eyes firmly on hers he promised, “We will find her.”

Clarke drew in one shaky breath, and another, and then she nodded. He leaned in to briefly press his forehead against hers, a broken fragment of time, but enough to remind her she wasn’t in this alone. There was no one better equipped than Roan to help her.

After all that’s how she and Roan had met, all those years ago. Roan had tracked her down when no one else could. He would find Madi for them now.

Roan dropped his hand and stepped back, gesturing for her to lead the way to Madi’s aerie. One of the spots from which they’d been spying on the prisoner ship since the day it had landed in their Green.

Disrupting their world. Changing it again. Another irrevocable moment of time, dividing their story into _before_ and _after_.

~~~~

Clarke and Roan hadn’t discovered each other until nearly two years after Praimfaya.

They hadn’t found each sooner, of course, because they hadn’t been looking for each other.

She’d thought he was dead. Killed by Luna in the Conclave. He’d thought she was safe in the bunker, which he knew to be buried under the remains of the city.

Luna hadn’t actually delivered a killing blow.

Faint from pain and blood loss and barely holding onto his senses, Roan had crawled away. Blindly seeking shelter from the burning rain. By the time he was fully conscious again the Conclave was long over and the radiation wave was nearly on top of Polis. Somehow he’d kept enough of his wits about him to remember what Raven had told him about radiation. Remembered to go to ground, to get as much earth between himself and the radiation as possible.

So that’s what he’d done. Stumbled into the old tunnels below the city, blundered deep and deeper. Burned and bleeding and oozing from blisters and slashes and stabs, dazed and concussed and confused and nearly, but like Clarke hundreds of miles away on Becca’s island, _not quite_ dead.

He wasn’t alone. Not right at first. Scores of Arkers exiled from the bunker understood the basics of radiation exposure just as well as Raven did. Like Roan, many of them had headed below ground, instinctively clinging to that last little bit of life. A few Grounders had seen them and followed. All of them blistered and burned. All of them dying.

Roan found them. Watched helplessly as they grew weaker while he grew stronger, his nightblood already working to heal his scorched and gashed body.

He bandaged the worst of their seeping burns and brought them water. Listened to them rant about that treacherous bitch Octavia Blake, who’d won the conclave, but invited in more than a thousand grounders and thrown out all but one hundred of her own to die. That traitorous murderous Octavia Blake, hidden child of factory who’d reached out her hand and saved none but those fucking ponces from Alpha after all.

And then by the score, then by the dozen, then one by one, even the hardiest of them had died.

Roan survived. He found water and food. Rats and snakes mostly. And bugs.

He healed. Eventually he went higher. Turned back when his skin blistered. Pressed upward again once his skin was whole, until the blisters rose again. He got closer to the surface with each attempt. He finally emerged into a changed world on the edge of winter. He retreated below and waited out the storms.

In the spring he built himself a better camp on the surface, in the ruins of the ruins. Learned to live again. Regained his strength. Tested the capabilities of his body remade by the nightblood. Then he left to go exploring.

Just about the time, she and Roan had later realized, that Clarke and Madi arrived in the city to discover that they could no longer find the entrance to the bunker. That it was buried under the broken rubble of Polis.

She and Madi hadn’t stayed in the ruins. They’d fled back to the Green, where Clarke had found Madi months earlier on her first venture away from Becca’s lab. They tried Polis again maybe a half a year later, better stocked with supplies. And run right into Roan, back from his own journeys.

Clarke and Roan had nearly killed each other right then and there. Each of them thinking they were encountering some huge mutated animal, shambling through the ruins.

Given his whole look – beast man of the wild lands, two years uncombed and unshaven, draped in layers of light fabric against the burning sun – she truly felt to this day he was lucky she’d realized that he was human at all.

Once they’d recognized each other, Roan and Clarke had fallen into each other’s arms in a delight so intense it was almost euphoric, yelling and laughing and crying all at once, swinging each other around and around, pounding on each other’s backs, stopping only to start up again.

Madi had hidden under the Rover in panic at the sight.

Later that night, settled around a friendly fire, Clarke told him of their last desperate attempts to escape the radiation wave. Of Raven’s work to save them by blasting off in the rocket for the remains of the Ark.

Right after he’d asked her what the hell she was doing as she finished up her daily radio call to Bellamy.

Roan had been utterly horrified.

He’d been blithely confident that Raven, like herself, like Octavia and Bellamy and Kane and Indra and like all the senior leadership of Azgeda, was safely inside the bunker under Polis. Riding out the horrors of Praimfaya and the burned world safe in the arms of the technological wonders of the world before. All part of Octavia’s new Wonkru.

Learning that Raven had been left behind at Becca’s Island, frantically working on one last project, had sent him flying into bellowing rage, quieted only because it had scared the shit out of Madi. For the second time that day.

“That’s why no one told you before the Conclave!” Clarke had hissed, once they’d settled Madi back down. “You would have disrupted everything over it and we were barely holding things together as it was!”

“She’d fried the remains of the chip in her head even before I left the island. That was the whole point of her killing herself in that fucking tank! Destroying the last of ALIE. She was safe! She was alive! She was supposed to be in Polis, in the bunker, making it ready! She should have been one of the one hundred Arkers with a safe spot!” he’d hissed back, stomping frantically around his small rooms, whirling on her to exclaim, “Why didn’t you stop her from doing something so stupid?”

Clarke hadn’t known if she’d wanted to yell or spit. “You selfish fucking idiot! She stayed because of you. She was trying until the bitter end to find some way to save Azgeda. You’d told her a bunker that held a thousand people was nothing to a king of a people ten times that number. How could you call yourself a king of anything when all your people died, you asked her? She was trying to find you a miracle. You complete and utter ass!”

Very teeny tiny silver lining, he’d been glad to learn of Echo’s possible survival.

“I’ve regretted banishing her almost as soon as I did it,” he’d confessed, his voice and expression both full of honest regret. “If I’d had the chance, I would have taken it back.”

Clarke and Madi took Roan home with them then, to the Green. He’d stayed with them for a long time. It had been wonderful to have another person with them. To be that much less alone in the world. He’d been even more desperate for companionship than they’d been, because he’d been by himself for that much longer.

He was less taciturn than the average grounder to begin with, and for months he was the life of their new little family. Full of stories about what he’d seen since Praimfaya, and in all his travels before, and how the world had changed. He told them tales of growing up a Prince of Azgeda, about the world he’d known that was gone. Showed them edible plants they didn’t recognize, cooking methods neither of them knew. Taught them games, sang them songs, shared the children’s stories his nurses had told him, and the lore his masters had taught him.

He was also a grounder through and through. His entire approach to dealing with children, with Madi, initially drove Clarke fucking crazy. It was part of why he didn’t stay in the Green much these days, even though he’d changed and adapted and, in Clarke’s view, grown to understand and accept and even value the wisdom of her methods.

She’d prevailed, but the price was he’d stepped so far back he was gone, away exploring or off climbing in the mountains, almost as much time as he was with them at home in the Green.

In the beginning, he’d expected absolute, instantaneous, and unquestioning obedience from a child. He was angry and loud and cutting when he didn’t get it. He’d also had zero compunction about corporal punishment when he’d first joined them.

Clarke had had a screaming meltdown after the first, and only, time he’d ever slapped Madi for disobeying him. A quick study himself, he’d never ever raised a hand to Madi again.

However, for years afterward he’d continued to needle Clarke fucking endlessly about how she was spoiling Madi, making her soft, failing to teach her the respect and obedience necessary to survive in the wild. At the same time, he’d been far more willing to encourage Madi to attempt physical skills far beyond her capacity.

In Clarke’s judgment, anyway.

They’d argued loudly about that, too.

Madi, naturally, had learned to play them off against each other like a pro.

They’d figured it out. Eventually. And gotten much better about checking in with each other so as not to get gamed by a beguiling eight-year-old. But it was exhausting as hell to get to that point.

After a year or so they’d decided to hit the road. Go back to Polis. Travel around. See how the world had changed.

It was a nightmare trip. The weather was terrible. Madi was carsick. A lot. Gear was forgotten and mislaid after stopping for the night…So much circling back to retrieve so much forgotten gear.

Food and drink was spilled inside the Rover, driving Roan to new heights of acid-tongued commentary.

Misspoken directions. Right. Left. My right? No, my right? So left? No! Right! Stuck in the mud. Drive until the battery was dead. Squabble over the music choices.

About the time they’d finally gotten all sorted, found a rhythm that worked for all of them, Roan had announced he’d really like them to go all the way to Azgeda. See what there was to see.

Clarke had argued that was a waste of time. It would be the same burned-over desolate wreck everything else was, and there was no purpose to dragging Madi on such a long trip.

Roan had said, “Fine. You go on with your route then. I’ll come back to the Green when I’ve seen what I want to see,” grabbed his conveniently packed gear, and left.

Madi had cried silent tears. Clarke had kicked the tires.

“Why did Roan leave us, Nomi?” Madi had asked. Every day for weeks, and every week after that until he returned.

“I don’t know,” Clarke had said. Until the truth finally burned it’s way out of her heart and past her lips. “He wanted us to visit his homeland. I said no. He went his way. We went ours.”

He did come back a few months later, full of stories of all that he’d seen. Ready to be the life of the party again. But he never stayed for as long after that. A few weeks, or a month or more, planting season or harvest, the worst of midwinter, helping with repairs, and then he’d gradually fall quiet. Soon he’d say it was time to see what there was to see. Off he’d go, the days bleeding into seasons and then one day he’d reappear, and the cycle would begin again. And two more years crawled by.

Sometimes Clarkre and Madi went with him when he went exploring. Usually they didn’t.

When they hit the five-year mark they went back to Polis.

Tried again to find a way into the sealed-off bunker. Spent weeks poking around, looking for other entrances or exits, hurling rocks, snarling at each other, until they were out of food and water and had to give up and leave again.

Galling them both the whole time they were in Polis was the unknown fate of Team Space. Each passing day rubbing them ever more raw. Unanswerable questions piling up in the longer and longer silences between them.

What if the station doors had never opened? What if Bellamy and Raven and the rest had never made it inside? What if they’d never grown enough food? Had enough oxygen? Tried to come down but burned up on reentry and Clarke and Roan had never even seen the tiny flare in the night sky?

What if, what if, what if?

All the unspoken _what ifs_ rising up and choking off their throats until they were communicating mostly in grunts and gestures that Madi had interpreted into words for them, carrying out their rare three-way conversations mostly by herself.

Only none of their fears had come to pass after all.

All the terrible _what ifs_ blown away like so many nightmares, vanquished by the light of day.

Team Space was on the ground at last.

But no joyful reunion was to be had on planet-burned-the-hell-up-twice-over.

No. Clarke curled her lip. That had clearly been entirely too much to fucking hope for.

Because a fucking prison ship had arrived in the meantime. Team Space chose the wrong place to land. Madi was missing. Bellamy was a too-familiar stranger, and he and Monty were keeping secrets. However much he and the rest of them had counted on her survival and Roan’s, Bellamy’d never heard her six years of daily reports. Never heard her pouring out her heart.

Radio calls that Clarke was now suspecting that the prison ship had picked up. They’d landed nearly on top of one of her primary broadcast locations. There was no conceivable way that was merely random chance.

Not that anyone from the _Eligius_ had ever answered her, either.

This was the most glaring sign, she was convinced, of their openly hostile intentions. If they had been listening to six bloody years of her updates to Bellamy then they would know exactly what they were landing into. Know exactly who Madi was. Who Roan was. What was wrong with the bunker in Polis. Know how desperate she was for company. How incredibly happy she’d have been for ANYONE to pick up and respond to her. How easy it would have been for them to start chatting her up, lull her into a friendly, even an enthusiastic welcome. 

She’d tried to explain this to the three men earlier, but somehow her tongue got all tied up in her fears for Madi and she worried that she’d not made any sense.

~~~~

Roan raised his hand as he came to a stop.

He’d fallen easily into the lead some time back. He usually wound up in front. His stride was longer and he’d inevitably start treading on her heals if he was behind her.

He pointed to a scarred old pine with a sharply bent crook in its trunk, perched on the ridgeline opposite their position. “That old watchtower tree?” he asked, his voice too low to carry. “That’s where she was?”

“Yes,” Clarke replied, equally softly.

He swung his rifle off his back, lifted it up and squinted into the scope to get a closer view. “I cleared around the base two seasons back. No one could have snuck up on her,” he said. “Madi left it of her own choosing.”

He glanced at Clarke, who’d been peering at the tree through her gun scope.

“Which doesn’t mean she couldn’t have been grabbed someplace else,” he added. “We’ll have to start there and follow.”

Clarke twitched her gun back over her shoulder. “I really think they must have heard at least some of my radio calls to Bellamy. To the Ark.”

“Given where they landed, I agree.”

“That they never answered me is not a good sign.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Bellamy thinks we should try to be diplomatic.”

“Starting with a spear in the chest is a poor strategy, I grant him. But assuming good intentions on their part would also be a mistake.” Roan touched her elbow. Once he had her attention he said, “I heard you. I agree with you. They aren’t friends. If they have Madi, it’s not good. But let’s go find out before we do anything rash, okay?”

The hard-packed ground around the base of the tree didn’t reveal much. There was also nothing to indicate any signs of a struggle or of the passage of anyone unfamiliar with moving about in the woods.

Roan was silent and still for a long time, and Clarke stood with him. Trying to sink into the same meditative-like state that would allow her to shut out the wild spinning in her brain and focus only on the sights and sounds around her.

She was still trying to decide if she was seeing anything other than their passage through the woods when Roan grunted, “This way.”

Clarke saw, or told herself she saw, at least some of the signs he was following. She also thought, after a time, that she knew what Madi must have been doing. “She’s circling around from the north, coming in on our camp from the southeast.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see any sign that anyone was following her.”

“No.”

Another mile through the slowly gathering twilight, and Roan stretched out his hand. Then, with his eyes as much as his fingers, he gestured to a small spur in the ridgeline they were traveling beside. With a flicker of his tongue he wet his lips, then whistled. A quick little trill, three times. The call of a bird native to the western side of the mountains, to his home. A species, as far as Clarke knew, he’d not seen or heard in six years.

There was a rustling, and then the barrel of a gun poked through what had appeared to be a drift of leaves caught around the roots of a toppled tree. A small dark head followed.

And then with a flurry, the leaves exploded and Madi hurled herself down the slope and straight into Roan, colliding with such force he actually rocked back a step.

“Roan!” she cried in a glad hoarse whisper, wrapping her arms around his waist in a fierce embrace.

“Heya, geda,” he murmured, stroking her hair as she buried her face in his chest. “Heya, geda.”

Then Madi was winding her arms around Clarke’s shoulders, muffling a quiet sob of relief into Clarke’s neck. “Nomi,” she breathed.

Clarke hugged her tightly and closed her eyes, concentrating on the rapid beat of Madi’s heart against her own, and simply held on for as long as she could.


	3. Chapter 3

Clarke swore softly as her hands slipped on the wet strap. The threatened rain she’d smelled on the air hours ago was still holding off, but mist and fog had arrived with full dark. Everything she touched was coated in a thick layer of cold slime.

She shook out her fingers, then rubbed them briskly together, blowing on them in a weak attempt to get enough feeling back after wrestling the canvas cover onto the top of the Rover.

With Roan and Madi helping, they’d made short work of loading up Clarke’s entire weapons cache into the top rack. No way was she going to leave any of it for the _Eligius_ crew to stumble across after they left the Green, headed west to join up with the rest of Team Space on the far side of Polis.

Now she was just finishing up testing the knots on the straps that secured the canvas.

Branches snapping and wet leaves rustling drew her attention, and she looked up to see Bellamy and Monty stepping into the clearing.

“Did you find her? Did you find Madi?” Bellamy asked, almost in the same breath that Monty exclaimed, his eyes wide with wonder, “You have the Rover?”

“Yes, we found Madi! And, I have the Rover!” Clarke grinned softly at them.

Relief from finding Madi, safe and whole, still suffused her – making her feel oddly like she was floating. And she was still ridiculously pleased with herself more than five years later that she’d found the Rover.

So maybe it was a last bubble of that euphoria shading her perceptions, but to Clarke Bellamy and Monty appeared a bit like figures stepping out of legend as they entered her clearing.

Maybe it was the way the light from the battery lantern at her feet caught the water droplets falling into their dark hair, dappling their shoulders and making them both look a bit like fairy kings, clothed in stardust. Maybe it was the mist, giving everything a faint glow.

Clarke pushed the fanciful thought away in the same instant it danced across her mind. Years of crafting stories for Madi may have given her a whimsical turn of phrase, she told herself, but it was time to refocus on the here and now.

When it had been only the three of them in the world, it hadn’t mattered that she’d populated all the empty spaces with elves and knights and fairy queens and dragons and monsters and mages and wizards. All crafted for the entertainment of a lonely child. Or that most of the heroes of her stories had looked like Bellamy, one way or another.

Or that she’d had a whole stash of fantasies she’d never shared. Private ones, held back for private times. Dreams about what it would have been like if, say, Bellamy had been the third person here with them. Here in the Green. If she’d thought to steal that last dose of nightblood serum for him.

Or if Bellamy, by some miracle, had managed to drop down early and all by himself. Like Raven had, all those years ago.

If he’d stepped out of a pod and into the hazy heat of a summer meadow, full of spiky flowers and tall grasses. While Clarke sat waiting for him under a vine-draped pergola, her hair long and soft across her shoulders and her welcoming smile as warm as the air around her.

Perhaps with a meal spread out on a low table at her side. Chosen to tempt a traveler weary and hungry from the empty cold of space. Fresh-baked bread and wild honey, cold roasted meats and nuts, smoked fish and the first greens of the summer waiting. Cool fresh water drawn from the nearby streams and sweating in metal pitchers.

If then he’d walked through the grass towards her, his whole face lit with the kind of smile she’d only seen a few times. Her name on his lips, “ _Clarke_.”

The way the bench would shift under his weight as he sat down by her legs. The feel of his skin of his back under her fingers.

But the world had changed again and it was cold and wet and dark and she had to change with it or someone was going to get hurt. Someone was going to get killed.

If only the gulf between her dreams and the present weren’t quite so wide, Clarke thought with a flash of quickly suppressed resentment. Her private fantasies were her own, of course. But when Bellamy had actually appeared she hadn’t been lounging on pillows in a flower-strewn meadow with a welcoming smile on her face. Oh no. She’d had her back to a tree, a rifle in her hands and been in a furious panic over her missing daughter, ready to wreck havoc and war on strangers in Madi's name.

She was too old and had seen too much to waste time on worrying about fairness, but the contrast was a stark and completely shitty reminder that the Earth gave no fucks about Clarke Griffin’s hopes and dreams, and never had.

“Yes,” she assured Monty and Bellamy quickly, brushing away the sunlit cobwebs, and forcing a broad smile to cover any weird pause, “we found Madi. Roan was right. She’d gone radio-silent and was making her way back here safe and slow. She’s resting down in the cellar. Where it’s warmer and dry.”

Bellamy peered around the small circle of light. “Where is Roan?”

“He went out on point. Making sure we’re still safe and undiscovered. For now. And that you’d find your way in the dark. I’m sure he saw you. He’ll be back soon.”

“We didn’t see him,” Monty said dubiously.

Clarke dismissed this with a quick wave. Arkers had never been the equals of grounders in the woods. Six years back in space were unlikely to have improved their skills. “You wouldn’t have.”

Bellamy shifted impatiently, and seemed about to object, but seemed to think better of it.

“Clarke?”

A child’s hesitant voice had them all spinning for the door to the cellar.

Clarke rushed over. “Madi! You’re awake!”

Her dark-haired foster daughter, braids mussed from sleeping, stepped cautiously out into the night. “I heard voices.”

Clarke dropped a reassuring arm around Madi’s slim shoulders, and pulled her close as she ushered her into the light.

“Madi, this is Bellamy Blake, and Monty Green.” She gestured to each as she named them. “My old friends from the Ark. The ones Roan brought here.”

Bellamy smiled down at Madi. “So Roan was right? You were hiding?”

Madi nodded, a shyly answering smile creeping across her face and recognition in her eyes.

All those stories Clarke had spun for Madi about the Ark, about the delinquents, about their adventures, terrible and great, during their first months on the ground. Bellamy had been in most of them, at least a little bit. And Clarke had illustrated them all, and not just with words. Filling notebook after sketchpad with drawings of all those she missed, of the things they’d seen, of the places she’d been.

Clarke had been wondering how Madi would react to meeting him now. If she would recognize him and be overawed, or if she would find the real him lacking in some way.

A little tongue-tied seemed to be the answer. Happy, interested, but…also unusually quiet. Madi’s dark eyes raked the men before her. Was she measuring them, Clarke wondered? Against the stories, or her drawings, or both?

“That’s good,” Monty said. “Because we were getting pretty worried. We didn’t see any sign that the _Eligius_ had a new prisoner.”

“We did see earth-moving machines though.” Bellamy turned to Clarke. “Bulldozers. Diggers. What looked like some really big drills.”

He paused, his brows raised as he waited for her reaction. She heard the eager plea in his voice. Saw the excitement of it across his shoulders. In the way he rocked forward onto the balls of his feet.

Clarke didn’t respond. She couldn’t. She felt nothing but dread over the _Eligius_ and her crew.

“They could be the answer to getting into the bunker, Clarke.” His excitement was practically vibrating off him now. “We could dig them out.”

They hadn’t had a chance to talk yet. She and Bellamy. About the last six years. About space. Or about Polis. About Octavia and the rest of Wonkru. Or this new ship, and these new people.

Roan had filled her in a little while they’d loaded the Rover. Told her how he’d located Bellamy and Monty, after guessing they’d be heading to Polis and what route they’d take. How he’d asked them to return to their landing site immediately, to meet up with the rest of Team Space. Meet up with Raven. How Bellamy had objected to this, insisting on continuing onward to Polis, and toward Clarke, first.

Bellamy and Monty had been dismayed by the news of the sealed bunker, but not surprised. It explained the empty world. But Bellamy had been adamant that he and Monty could find a way in, despite Roan’s description of the remains of the city. Or Roan’s recounting of all his and Clarke’s failed efforts to find an entrance. Or of their fears that the long silence might mean that there was no one left alive inside the bunker still trying to get out.

As Roan told Clarke the story while they worked, he’d insisted that he understood Bellamy’s desire to reach Octavia, and was willing to do all he could. But he’d clearly been offended by Bellamy’s and Monty’s shared confidence that they’d immediately find some easy solution. By their implication that he and Clarke had mysteriously overlooked some obvious clue during all their own many fruitless attempts to find a way in or out of the bunker over six years of searching on their own.

Clarke had no trouble imagining how much Bellamy would want to find a way to break out any survivors. How much he’d want to make contact with his sister. Or how casually insulting he’d be to Roan about six years of failure to find the door. She got it. She did.

Bellamy’s zeal wasn’t yet tempered by years of fruitless searching for a way in.

But hers most definitely was. Roan’s was. Madi’s was.

Clarke no longer believed that there were any easy solutions to be found. Especially not by soliciting help from dangerous strangers with purposes and agendas of their own.

“No, Bellamy.” Clarke shook her head at him. She knew he wasn’t going to like it, but surely he could understand her as easily as she understood him. “These new people aren’t the answer. At least not right now. Something is going wrong with the _Eligius_ crew. Some kind of split. We don’t need to be in the middle of it. We can’t deal safely with them until after someone comes out on top. We need to clear out and let them settle their own problems. Then maybe we can make some deals.”

“Four hours ago you were planning to blow them up!” he exclaimed indignantly. “And now you just want to run from them? When are you going to try opening up some sort of diplomatic channel?”

“Four hours ago I thought they had Madi!” She instinctively clutched more tightly at Madi’s shoulders.

“Really?” Madi looked up at her in surprise. “You were going to blow them up?”

Clarke forced herself to ease up on her grip, shifting to briskly rubbing Madi’s upper arms instead. “Well!” She added a little laugh, making it sound ridiculous. Which it was. In hindsight. “I was going to threaten to blow them up unless they gave you back. I thought they’d grabbed you.”

Madi gaped at her. “You and Roan didn’t tell me that!”

Clarke waved her hands in the air, brushing it aside. “It wasn’t important.”

Madi’s expression was completely serious. “Thanks.”

Clarke matched her tone, and meant every word. “You’re family. Anything for family. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Because they never even found you. You were being smart and sneaky. Just like we taught you.”

“Why did you go radio-silent?” Monty directed his question to Madi. “It really freaked Clarke out.”

“Go ahead,” Clarke urged her daughter. “Tell them what you saw. It will help them understand why I’ve decided we can’t stay. Why I think talking to them now is premature.”

Madi debriefed again. Haltingly at first, with greater confidence as she went along. Gaining assurance from the way Bellamy and Monty listened with focused concentration. She told them how she’d been watching from her perch, well-protected and completely out of sight. Using her binoculars she’d been tracking a small group from the _Eligius_ headed out more or less in her direction. And then she’d realized that a second small group was following the first.

Then the second group caught up with the first group, greeted them, and hacked them down. Killed every member of the first party, and then hid their bodies under piles of leaves and bracken.

“So I waited to make sure they were all going back to the _Eligius_ and then I headed back for our camp,” Madi explained. “But I didn’t want to be surprised. Or followed. So I turned off my radio so they couldn’t track me that way. I went slow, and careful. Until I heard Roan’s signal.”

Bellamy nodded approvingly at her. “Clarke said you were smart, said you know the woods.”

His instinctive ease with children was still a part of his charm, Clarke saw, and hadn’t faded with time. She was very conscious of how proud she felt at the sight. And how unearned that pride was.

“Yes.” Madi nodded vigorously. Then she added a heartfelt, “I didn’t want to be found by them. Not after seeing that.” She grimaced melodramatically and shuddered in distaste.

“Good work.” Bellamy’s praise was like a benediction, and Madi glowed from the heat of it.

“Madi’s report adds to what she and I have been observing for the last two days,” Clarke said. “Close-in perimeter guards, more worried about people leaving the ship than anyone outside it, and a lot of angry arm-waving. And lots of sick and injured people being helped out to their clinic. That crew is splitting over something. Mutiny. Prisoner revolt. Political dispute. Whatever. I don't know. I don’t care. But I don't want the four of us or Madi caught up in it. I want us out of the Green and headed for reinforcements ASAP.”

“Clarke, I really think that’s premature,” Bellamy was shaking his head, his voice slipping easily, too easily perhaps for Clarke’s comfort, from persuasion to command. “I agree that they’re in trouble, yes. Based on your reports and what Monty and I saw tonight, which seems like more of the same. Lots of movement. Also lots of distress. Something definitely has them riled up. But we need their machines. That’s the best shot we have at getting our people out of the bunker. We can’t just leave before we find out if there’s a deal to be had here, if there’s some opening for negotiations, some opportunity to gain their cooperation.”

“Are you joking?” Clarke gaped at him. “You seriously want the four of us, out-manned and out-gunned, to get sucked into whatever crap is going down with them? Now that we know for certain they’re already murdering each other?”

“They have the equipment that can get us into the bunker, Clarke. And you just said it yourself. Anything for family. Octavia is my family. Miller is my family. Abby is yours.”

“No.” Clarke rocked back on her heels and folded her arms. “No way! Absolutely not! That is crazy. And no one would understand that better than my mother!”

“Well, what does Roan think?” Bellamy demanded, his hands on his hips, matching her glare for glare. Then, looking around in irritation, he added, “Where **_is_** Roan?”

“Here…” Roan stamped into the lamp-lit circle, a bound man draped fireman-carry-style across his shoulders.

“I waited to make sure you hadn’t been found, hadn’t been followed.” He leaned over and let the body slip with an inelegant thud onto the ground at his feet. “You were.”

Clarke stared at the bound stranger in dismay, a fresh wave of panic washing her spine. “Are there more of them?”

“No. Not yet. Just the one.” He glowered at them all from under his brow. “So far.”

Bellamy swore softly under his breath. “Fucking hell.”

Roan shot him an exasperated glare.

Clarke swore, inside her head, where no one could hear her.

The man, his hands and feet secured and a rough cloth over his head, began struggling feebly and moaning.

Roan dragged him to the front of the Rover. Then he jerked open the driver’s side door reached in and turned it on, immediately flipping on the headlamps. He pulled his prisoner to his knees and set him facing square into the bright beams. Standing so that he would appear as little more than a looming silhouette, Roan yanked off the man’s hood.

The prisoner recoiled from the light.

“What’s your name?” Roan growled.

The young man, maybe middle twenties was Clarke’s best guess, with splotchy unshaven cheeks and very pale in the blinding headlamps, blinked painfully and swallowed hard. He also firmed up his jaw and said nothing.

The mist was slowly changing into rain.

“You were following our men in the dark. Either you’re escaping your crew and want help, in which case you should talk to us right now, or you’re under orders. We’d have to assume you’ve been sent to spy on us. Lead others to us. With no good intentions at all. What’s your name?”

The young man didn’t answer.

Roan backhanded him. “What’s your name?”

Clarke sent Madi back to the cellar. “Stay dry,” she said.

Madi grimaced, but scuttled down the stairs without hesitation, the sound of Roan’s fist on the stranger’s skin loud in the rain behind her.

Roan hit the prisoner a third time. “What’s your name?”

The prisoner shook his head, coughed, spit, and then, wonder of wonders, actually produced a name. Followed by a number ID.

And that’s all he would say no matter how hard Roan hit him or what questions he asked.

After a fifth blow fell without a change, Clarke cried, “Wait! Let me try!”

Roan stepped back with a courteous little bow that was also simultaneously sardonic and irritating.

Clarke ignored this.

“Please,” she said to the young man. “None of us have a lot of trust for strangers. But we’d like to get to know each other. See if we can find some common ground for negotiations. And for that we need something beyond names. We need to know what’s brought you back to Earth after all these years. Why you landed here, in the Green. What you’re looking for. Why you’re fighting with each other.”

“What’s your name, then?” he asked her, his voice rusty but still strong. His English was clear, but oddly accented.

Clarke met Bellamy’s eyes across the prisoner’s head. He nodded.

“My name’s Clarke,” she said to the man on his knees. “Clarke Griffin. I think you might have heard my radio broadcasts.”

The younger man’s eyes widened, but his mouth curled into a disdainful smirk.

Clarke pressed her lips together. He clearly knew her name.

“What is going on with your crew?” she repeated.

The prisoner said nothing.

“We’ve seen the fighting. We know that something has gone terribly wrong for you somehow. Can you explain it to us? So we can understand?”

Still nothing.

“I’m Bellamy. Bellamy Blake.” Bellamy stepped, not into the light so that the prisoner could see him, but at an angle so that he too was nothing but a looming outline. “You followed us. Why?”

The prisoner actually looked surprised for a moment, peering up curiously, and then his face stilled again.

“I’ve seen medics helping others,” Clarke pushed a little more. Let a little throaty tremor deeper into her voice. “The adjustment back to the earth isn’t going well, is it? Background radiation levels are much higher than they used to be. Than you expected. Than your bloodtech was prepared for.”

“We can help you.” Bellamy’s voice was at its richest and most soothing. “And possibly you could help us. There could be room for a deal here. One that might benefit everyone involved.”

The bound man closed his eyes against the light and repeated his name and ID number.

“Enough.” Roan stepped up behind the prisoner, wrapped his arm around his neck and began choking him out.

When Bellamy and Clarke cried out in objection, Roan merely tightened his arm and grunted, “This was going nowhere, and we don’t have time for a more thorough interrogation.”

“So, what? You’re just going to kill him?” Monty demanded.

Roan turned his head to Monty, his lip curled disdainfully. “No! If I was going to do that, he’d be dead already.”

The stranger passed out.

Roan waited longer, to ensure there was no trickery involved, then laid the young man’s limp form on the wet ground.

“We can dump him in the wash by the creek on our way past. He’ll wake up there in a few hours.”

“Our way past?” Bellamy asked.

“We’re leaving. Didn’t Clarke tell you?” Roan cast another extremely irritated glare around their small group.

“I’d just told them,” Clarke said. “And the Rover is packed.”

“I disagree! It’s too soon,” Bellamy said, rocking back. “We should stay. I think there’s more to learn here. More to be gained by cooperation and a deal. I think we …”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Roan cut him off. “We now know for certain they’ve heard at least some of Clarke’s radio broadcasts. Enough that even this boy,” he toed the unconscious man at his feet, “recognizes your names. Enough to think your story is _amusing_.”

Roan stared Bellamy down, the rain falling more heavily now, beading on their eyelashes, dripping down their cheeks and into their beards. Caught in the bright blue-white glare of the headlamps, the water sparkled on their skin.

However inappropriate her reaction might be, however badly-timed, Clarke allowed herself a fleeting moment of appreciation for the strange beauty of the scene, wondered if she could capture it later somehow in pen and ink.

“That means they could have come calling,” Roan was rocking forward, his arm raised dramatically as he gestured at Clarke. “Looking for her, or Madi. For you. They didn’t. They aren’t friendly and have no intention of wasting time appearing to be friendly. We’re in a terrible position tactically and strategically. We need to retreat to better ground, stock up, find what reinforcements we can.”

“Bellamy, you were right before!” Clarke drew herself up. “About starting well or starting badly with these new people. I didn’t shoot anyone. I didn’t blow open their doors. Roan hasn’t killed anyone either. We’ve let them know we’d prefer to negotiate. This man is fine. Unharmed. He’ll wake up with a headache. Some bruises. That’s it. That door is still a little bit open.”

“Let me be clear,” Roan said, his voice louder and angrier now. “I’m done playing native guide. I’m leaving in the next five minutes. I think Clarke and Madi are coming with me. You and Monty can come with us, stay here, or walk out on your own. I don’t much care which.”

“Clarke?” Bellamy turned to her, his own expression full of shock and dismay at this ultimatum.

“I’ve already had one near total meltdown today just thinking I lost Madi to them,” Clarke explained, her voice breaking a little with her urgency to get him to see her side. So he would understand and agree with her. Understand that she wasn’t just overruling him because she could. Because the Rover was hers and he didn’t really have any choice. Upset at the same time that they didn’t already just get it. That Bellamy didn’t _get it_. Get her. The way she remembered that he once had.

“I need to get Madi away from the Green. Someplace safe.” She gestured at the man on the ground. “Far away from them.” She caught Bellamy’s eyes with her own, tried pleading with him. “We’re leaving. I hope you come with us. Then I will come back here with you and help you deal with the _Eligius_ crew however you like.”

Bellamy, his glare still fixed and angry, appeared entirely unmoved by this offer.

Feeling desperate, Clarke held out her hand and swore, “You have my word. I will help you in any and every way I can as soon as I know Madi is safe.”

Bellamy and Monty exchanged glances. Monty indicated with a quick spread of his hands it was up to Bellamy. Bellamy turned back to Clarke. “Fine.” He was curt and barely resigned. He ignored her hand. “We’ll come with you. Not that you’ve given us much choice.”

Clarke dropped her hand and met his eyes squarely, tried to let him know how much this meant to her. More than simple words could express. She wiped her palm against her hip. “Thank you.”

It took only a few more minutes to summon Madi and close up the cellar, gather the last scattered packs, sling the still unconscious crewman from the _Eligius_ into the back, and then Clarke reminded everyone to take a quick personal stop.

“Seriously?” Monty said, when she did.

Clarke wrinkled her nose in embarrassment. “It’s a kid-minding habit. Sorry.”

Monty smirked cheerfully. “Nah. Suits you.”

“Here.” Clarke fished two ration packs from the sack at her feet and handed them over as they waited for Madi. “We can all debrief in more detail as we drive, and you can eat in the Rover. Just don’t spill.” She smiled crookedly, aiming to maintain the lighter mood. “Drives Roan mental.”

Roan, who was just coming around the Rover from a last perimeter check raised his brow. “The best way to clean up a spill is not to have one in the first place. And crumbs attract insects.”

Monty chuckled, “That sounds like Raven.”

Roan met his eyes, let the pause grow too long, and said, “Then it will be good to show her that we know how to properly care for a machine.”

Monty clung to his smile with grim determination. “Right. She’ll appreciate that.”

“I know you’ve been frustrated by the delay in getting to her.” Bellamy sounded only a little strangled in issuing this not-exactly-an-apology apology. “But I was right. The _Eligius_ was headed here. We needed to get to Clarke.”

“We didn’t need to waste the time in Polis that we did. If you’d told me from the start about the _Eligius_ and what it was, the danger it represented, we could have come straight here. If we’d have come straight here, we would have arrived before them. Clarke and Madi never would have been in any danger at all.” Roan paused to flick his gaze over Bellamy disdainfully. “That they were ever in any danger is on you, not me.”

Bellamy’s eyes narrowed angrily. “Our time in Polis wasn’t wasted.”

“Seventeen days since I found you,” Roan countered. “So far.”

“Right.” Bellamy’s lips thinned into a flat line. “Seventeen days. Let’s move out.”

Roan nodded, yanked open the door and slid into the driver’s seat. He closed the door behind him with a solid _thunk_.

Bellamy and Monty exchanged a sidelong glance, then looked at Clarke.

Clarke prodded them gently but firmly toward the rear doors. “We’ve been traveling in the Rover together for years. Roan knows the way. And a good thing about leaving now is there will be no tracks.”

The rain was coming down harder still when they reached the creek. Clarke and Bellamy and Monty were thoroughly drenched by they time they’d stashed the unconscious and now untied prisoner under some bushes and well out of the path of the now happily gurgling streambed.

They were a very damp and silent crew as they drove out of the Green and onto the edge of the burnt over lands. The whine of the tires on ancient pavements gave way to the faint squelch of mud and sand. Staring into the pale white cone of the route ahead created by the headlamps and lulled by the regular swish of the windshield wipers, Clarke felt her eyes grow heavy. At some point, she slept.


	4. Chapter 4

Roan relinquished the driver’s seat to Clarke mid-morning. They stopped for food and a chance to stretch once they’d finally driven out from under the rain.

“It’s weird to see him driving,” Bellamy said quietly, after heavy snoring began to emerge from the back. He’d taken shotgun after the stop. “I understand it shouldn’t be, but it is.”

“No stranger, I’m sure, than seeing Echo and Emori in space,” Clarke countered with a smile.

She kept her hands on the wheel, and her eyes fixed virtuously on the route ahead, where mile after dusty mile of burned-over flatlands rolled away to the horizon. Despite the powerful temptation to look over at Bellamy every few minutes, just to reassure herself that he was really still there, and not some bizarre waking dream.

Bellamy harrumphed quietly. “True.”

“How was it? Really? I have so many questions.”

Six years in space, just the seven of them. ‘So many’ just barely described the pressure of the questions boiling up under Clarke’s scalp. From the huge and open-ended, _how did you stay sane?_ , to the tiniest and most picayune. _Where did you all sleep? What did you do in your down time? What does algae taste like?_

“It was hard,” Bellamy said, after a time.

He was quiet because he was gathering his thoughts, Clarke sensed, not because he didn’t want to talk.

“Really hard. Especially at the beginning. Getting the algae system up and running alone took weeks longer than we’d hoped. Monty’s hands were so burned from the radiation he couldn’t do much himself. Not for a long time. So he had to give directions to everyone else and no one did anything the exact way he wanted us to…” Bellamy trailed off on a rueful chuckle. “There was one day where I swear I thought he was actually going to try and kick Murphy to death, if only he could have caught him.”

Bellamy told the story, his familiar voice washing over her, and Clarke hung on every word, even when the occasional demands of navigating the odd dry wash or avoiding the sudden jutting remnants of some large structure meant she really wasn’t following all the details of the story.

She reveled in the sound of his voice. Let part of her mind drift along with her friends in space. Faded memories of Go-Sci filling in the gaps. Her sympathy and understanding for the rough times they’d faced adding in the tension and drama he largely left unspoken.

“… Murphy didn’t set the plugs properly and the water drained overnight from the salt bath into the …”

She’d missed this, missed him, so much. The talking and the listening and the sharing. Something she’d known, of course. In her head. Now she was feeling it in her body in a whole new way. Queer little aches and pains in her muscles and her joints. It almost hurt more now that he was back than it had hurt while he was gone.

Healing, she supposed idly. Numbness fading and the pain beginning.

“…. so we were using that to restart the soil mix and plant growth mediums...”

It was a funny little tale, told well, and Clarke laughed at all the right places, even if she’d missed some of the set up.

By then Monty was awake again, and protesting quietly that he’d really been in the right all along. This led to another funny little story about Emori finding someone’s hidden stash of plastic cups.

“We never did figure out who would have been hoarding two hundred and forty-seven plastic drinking cups. Or what on earth they would have been planning to do with them someday…”

Bellamy asked her then how she’d survived those first months on her own.

She shared her tale of her frantic dash to Becca’s lab, her lungs burning, her vision fading out, blisters rising all over her skin even as she fell through the upper doors and into the elevators. How she’d ridden out the worst of the radiation storms down in the safety of the deeply buried lab. It was safe and familiar now from all the times she’d told it to Madi, an easy story to tell while she drove.

“How did you and Madi find each other?” Monty asked.

“Madi?” Clarke tilted her head to see Madi’s alert face in the rearview mirror. “You want to tell it this time?”

“Sure!” Madi exclaimed, and then wiggled forward to kneel between the front seats and launched into her own history.

It began in the cellar in the Green with her parents, her real ones, when the radiation came. They’d fallen sick and eventually died, but had time to explain to her how to go look for food once their stockpiles were gone. How to make it through the winter and into the spring without them.

She told them how she’d spied Clarke driving the Rover through the Green the springtime following Praimfaya. Watched her stop and get out and wander through a meadow, her face to the sun, her fingers drifting through the tall grass in wonder. How beautiful she’d thought Clarke was, her golden hair shining in the light.

Madi paused then, clearly expecting her audience to respond.

“I can imagine,” Bellamy said, glancing at Clarke and waiting to catch her eye. “Like an angel.”

“An Elven Princess,” Madi corrected, with a frown. Angels having never been part of any of the stories that Clarke or Roan told her. “Like Galadriel. Or Goldberry.”

“Tolkien?” Bellamy chuckled a little, glancing at Clarke. “I had no idea you liked the classics.”

Bellamy asked Madi all kinds of questions about their lives in the Green after that. What they ate and how they cooked it and if Clarke was a good teacher, and did Madi like reading history or literature better.

Clarke was thrilled by their conversation. She could have listened to them talk all day.

Only Madi eventually got tired of playing please-the-new-adult. She passed off the conversation to Roan, who’d woken up at some point, by saying she really loved listening to him tell the histories of Azgeda, and had Bellamy ever heard those.

“Actually yes I have,” Bellamy said, his face and his voice closing off. Making it absolutely clear that he had no desire to learn anything at all from Roan. About anything. Ever. “I’ve heard them from Echo. They reminded me very much of the histories of ancient Rome.”

“I’m not surprised,” Roan said. “Apparently my Grandfather Theo took great inspiration from the Roman Republic. He thought it a good model for a warrior state.”

“I would have assumed Sparta was the model,” came Bellamy’s clipped reply.

At which point Clarke decided that if she had to listen to Bellamy and Roan start a pissing contest over ancient history as a model for current politics in a post-apocalyptic setting – a complete sentence that had actually come out of Roan’s mouth late one winter afternoon after too much jobi nut tea – she would willingly drive the Rover off the nearest cliff. With all its passengers still inside.

She eased her foot off the accelerator and announced that it was time for a rest break.

Bellamy offered to take a turn driving when they re-gathered.

Roan swung around to lean faux-casually against the driver’s side door, his smile toothy and not at all friendly. “I’ve slept and I’m rested. And I know where we plan to stop tonight.”

The muscle in Bellamy’s cheek jerked, and Clarke more sensed than saw him rock forward onto the balls of his feet. Pushing aside the vague sense of disbelief that she was falling into this role, she stepped between the two men.

Metaphorically anyway.

In reality she remained firmly planted at the apex of the triangle. If they actually took a swing at each other she had no intention of literally being in the middle.

“We’ve travelled this route before.” Clarke said, while shooting covert glares at Roan. Who ignored her. “We have some stocked campsites set up, but they’re a bit hard to see in the burned-over lands.”

Bellamy nodded shallowly, forcibly unclenched his jaw, then stamped off for the rear doors. Clarke followed, taking up the bench seat across from him. The Rover was full of gear and food, weapons all cached on top, but they’d left the two side benches so that they could, not lie down exactly, but recline enough to sleep.

She didn’t really have a plan, but she thought if she sat with Bellamy she would find some way to recover their easy conversation from the morning. Smooth things back down. Restore the fragile harmony.

Madi sized the opportunity to claim her turn in the front with Roan, leaving the open jump seat to Monty.

Clarke settled in, terribly conscious of the length of Bellamy’s legs filling the narrow space between the benches as he sat slouching against the far side. He folded his arms and rested his head against the stacked supplies, sliding his feet under the bench she was sitting on. Then he closed his eyes and gave every appearance of attempting to doze. Telegraphing loud and clear that he had absolutely no desire to speak to her at the moment.

So much for recovering harmony.

Since she couldn’t talk to him, Clarke seized the opportunity he presented and stared hungrily at him instead. Tried to overlay her memories of the younger man on top of his older self, trace the limits of where he’d altered and where he hadn’t. See if she couldn’t find some hint to explain what had changed. Why the Bellamy who’d embraced her so tenderly six years ago, who’d brushed her hair off her face, whose voice had cracked when he told her to hurry, had come back to her in body, but not in spirit.

And why this Bellamy had taken his place. Gruff. Bearded. Full of commands. Worried about his sister. Trying to shoulder responsibility for everything himself.

Maybe not so much had changed after all, she decided.

“Can I choose the music?” Madi eventually asked into the silence.

Fortunately she picked something upbeat and soothing, and soon she was singing along with her favorite lyrics. After some very pointed stares and throat clearing on Madi’s part Roan joined in on the chorus, and Clarke soon picked up on the harmony.

The mood in the Rover slowly thawed. Bellamy eventually opened his eyes and sat up, staring out the windows behind.

“Thank you,” she said. Trying a new approach, refusing to accept that the Bellamy she’d believed in all those years was entirely gone.

He turned to look at her, his face creased in confusion. “For what?”

“For choosing to believe I survived. Even without hearing my radio calls. I hated the idea that you would grieve for me. I hated it so much. Or that you would blame yourself for anything. Because I stayed here, you survived. You kept everyone else alive in space. Because I was here, I found Madi. And both of those things mean everything to me.”

Bellamy’s eyes widened in surprise. “You’re welcome. I’m glad that ...we… that I…” he trailed off, ducking his head, lost in whatever he was trying to say. When he raised his head, his expression was grave and earnest in a way that was uniquely Bellamy.

“I’m glad that we did, too. Especially now. But credit where it’s due. I wouldn’t have dared let myself hope. Not for a one in a million chance like that. I would have…” He paused to clear his throat. “I was too caught up in hating myself for leaving you behind, for not finding some other choice. You’ll have to thank Emori for pushing us to consider it at all.”

“Emori?” Clarke stammered. “Right. Emori. Monty said something…”

“Yes. Emori. She was amazing. She absolutely refused to give up on you. She’d had us wait at the lab hoping you’d arrive in time until the last second, and then longer, before we finally blasted off. Then she insisted you still could have made it back to safety before the fires, even after you fixed the dish.”

Clarke shook her head, stunned that the person who knew her least had dared to hope the most. She looked up to find Bellamy watching her. “Emori was right. I did make it,” she said. “You were right to listen to her.”

“She’d talked Raven around within a few days. Which wasn’t that hard because Raven wanted so badly to believe Roan could have made it, too.”

“Makes sense.”

“Yep. You and Roan both. Package deal. Raven insisted on that.” He shrugged and spread his hands, a ‘what can you do?’ expression on his face.

Clarke smiled crookedly in understanding. “She did give him the nightblood serum.”

“She also pointed out that no one had ever actually turned up with his body. Just the tags.” Bellamy’s answering smile was equally wry. “She insisted that without a body, she would choose to believe. And she announced that the rest of us wouldn’t question it. You know how she gets.”

Clarke frowned a little. She wanted to say that no, she didn’t know how Raven got. Not like that. Raven Reyes was as tough-minded as any person Clarke had ever met. Or she had been anyway. Clinging to a fantasy like that seemed bizarrely out of character for her.

Only it wasn’t a fantasy because Roan hadn’t died. He was driving the Rover right this very minute! Raven had been right to believe in him. Obviously Clarke wasn’t giving Raven Reyes, most brilliant mind of her generation, full credit for what she could and couldn’t know.

Bellamy was waiting for her to say something.

For lack of anything else, she said, “Yeah!”

“And then they went to work on the rest of us. Drew maps and graphed times and charted the amount of dirt and rocks above you’d need. Ran calculations to show that if you made it to shelter the nightblood would have been enough to see you through. See you both through.” He shook his head at the memory, then looked at Clarke, inviting her to share in his sense that their conviction was extraordinary.

“Maps and graphs and charts?” Clarke asked wonderingly.

“Turns out Emori loves math. She’s a trader. A merchant.” Bellamy’s expression flashed warm and proud for a second.

Clarke reflected that this was a very respectful way to say ‘thief.’ Six years of bonding in action, she realized. It was impossible to push down the pang of envy fast enough to pretend to herself she didn’t feel it.

“So running conversions and probabilities in her head was something she did all the time. Learning formulas and having tools to do it better and faster and she was like a kid with new toys.”

“We tried to be sober and run all the odds,” Monty added from his perch. “Accept that the Earth sucked and our luck was worse and everything we’d touched since landing had withered and died. Be prepared for the worst. But we all wanted it to be true so fucking bad. That you’d made it. That you’d both make it. That you wouldn’t be alone while you waited for Octavia and the rest.”

“Turns out Raven and Emori figured right on both counts.” Bellamy met her eyes, and grinned softly at her. “Because here you are. One in a million chance.”

She smiled back at him. “Here I am.”

Then she glanced toward the front to catch Roan’s eye in the rear view mirror. “Here we are.”

He smiled wryly at her, acknowledging her glance. Here they both were, indeed.

“And I found Madi,” Clarke turned her warm smile on her daughter’s head. “I don’t know if it was karma, or fate, or Jaha’s God at work. Or just chance. We saved each others’ lives. I wouldn’t change a thing. Not now.”

She looked back to Bellamy. For a fleeting second, before he smiled warmly again, he looked sad, and troubled, and the lines of command seemed deeper and more firmly etched in his face.

“And now you’re home,” she said, holding onto her smile. Determined not to drop to her knees and beg him to tell her what was wrong.

It’s not like she couldn't make a damn fine guess. The world was still a burnt-out husk. The bunker was still lost to them. A prison ship had landed, full of hostile new people in the middle of some internal fight. They were fleeing the largest area of living soil she knew, abandoning it to interlopers until they had some chance to retake it. Their odds of long-term survival were exactly as bleak today as they had been yesterday, and the day before that, and the year before that.

She said instead, “We’re all together again, and that’s what I’ve been dreaming of since the day you left. ”

“Course, we didn’t think of the bunker getting sealed shut by the rubble of the city. Who in the hell built a bunker without a back door? Multiple back doors?” Monty demanded plaintively of no one in particular. “Mount Weather had multiple doors! Rabbit in Winnie-the-Pooh has a fucking back door!”

They drifted into a long conversation about the bunker after that, laying out various theories about its original design and purposes, and why the people inside hadn’t found a way out. Or made one.

It passed the hours until the sun began to drop low on the horizon, and Roan said, “We’re here.”

Bellamy and Monty were gratifyingly impressed with their campsite that night. It was located in the remains of an old town, nothing much now but faint outlines in the burnt-over territory. Their camp was in the lee of the old town hall, the ancient limestone foundation blocks having withstood two different apocalypses. Now they sheltered a store of dry wood and a working well.

“We have filters,” Clarke explained, pulling them out of the back and handing them off to Madi. “Radiation is in the ground water, of course. But these do the job.”

Roan and Madi and Clarke fell easily into their familiar routines, pulling out the gear they needed and getting the fire started.

“You and Bellamy seem to be reconnecting,” Roan murmured, when they were out of sight of the main camp digging a shallow latrine.

Madi had taken Bellamy and Monty off to find more wood to replace the starter pile that was already heating up water for their supper. There had been a bit of a scuffle over who would do what task. Bellamy had invited Clarke to come with him and Madi in the hunt for wood, but Roan had been obnoxiously firm about requiring her assistance with the shovels. It was the least subtle insistence on a private conversation ever.

“Yeah.” Clarke shrugged. “Maybe.”

“He was obsessed with asking for every possible detail about how you were doing. If I could have given him a weekly report of your last six years I think he would have asked why I couldn’t give him a day-by-day accounting.”

“You don’t have to make me feel better.”

“Yes. I made that up.” Roan rolled his eyes, and then he shook his head at her in exasperation. “No, I didn’t. Yes, he really asked for every detail I could offer.”

As they were putting away the shovels he finally got around to his real concern. “Getting a lot of stories about space?”

“Yes.”

“Notice how Raven isn’t in any of them?”

“Um….” Clarke frowned. “Well, Now that you mention it….”

She trailed off. She didn’t want this to be true. It was, though.

Somewhat guiltily, and why the hell _she_ felt guilty about this she didn’t even know, she admitted, “She’s not in many, that’s for sure.”

“Try asking directly. See if they’ll tell you anything.”

Clarke did, and was rewarded over their small evening meal by a long meandering multi-part story about Raven searching the ring for a very specific piece of equipment she wanted, and all the weird things they’d found instead. Echo was particularly good at finding things it seemed, her pattern recognition skills remarkably transferable to the built environment of the orbital ring. Turned out plastic cups were the least strange thing that three generations of space-born Arkers had hoarded.

Clarke raised her brow at Roan as they prepared to turn in. “Happier?”

He just shook his head. “How much of that was actually about Raven?”

Clarke sighed. “You’re a little obsessed about this. They say she’s fine. Great. Insisted the whole time you were alive. She’s looking forward to seeing us, seeing you. What is your problem, anyway?”

“Nineteen days is my problem. The _Eligius_ is my problem. Skaikru and their secrets are my problem.”

Clarke closed her eyes, feeling buffeted on all sides. “I get it.” Her comfort wasn’t what he wanted, she knew, but she offered it anyway. She reached out and gripped his arm, shaking him lightly so he’d look at her again. “We’re almost there.”

He worked up a smile for her, and turned away.

She looked around then, wondering where Bellamy was bunking down. He and Monty were shaking out their sleeping bags on the far side of the fire. Leaving the near side, the more protected side, for her and Madi. She tried not to feel slighted. Tried to feel protected and nurtured instead.

Tried not to remember all her very different fantasies of Bellamy’s first night on Earth. Failed hard at not remembering, but had no desire to twist restlessly in her sleeping bag as she lay beside the coals of their dying fire and watched the few stars trying to burn through the scudding clouds.

By then all three men were snoring.

Used to the silence of her camp in the Green, broken only by the quiet sounds of Madi’s gentle night breathing, Clarke tried to decide which would be easier. To smother each of the men in turn with a blanket, or to smother herself.

She told herself to grow up and get a grip. Romantic stories were fine for drifting off to sleep, alone in the quiet of her cabin. They had nothing to do with the harsh light of the waking world on a radiation-scarred planet, running from new strangers and worried about new threats.

Her sleep was restless and full of unhappy dreams, barely remembered fragments of alarm and danger and loss.

The next morning Roan allowed Bellamy a turn at the wheel, pointing ahead to explain, “Just head straight for that shallow break in the hills. You’ll be able to see the edge of the lake valley in an hour or so.”

“Tell me again why you chose to land all the way out here?” Clarke asked Monty, who was sitting with her and Madi in the back.

“Water. We figured that at least some of the folks from Polis would want to be as close to a large body of fresh water as they could. And as we circled in we could see grass and trees on the lakeshore. So we were sure we’d find people there.”

Roan turned around at this, leaning over the back of the front bench to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite catch that. What did you see on the lakeshore?”

“Grass and trees?” Monty said, clearly uncertain of Roan’s tone. “Well. Not really trees it turns out. The big trees are dead and the new trees are tiny saplings. A few years old at best. What we thought were young trees are just out of control bushes, growing right on the edge of the water.”

“How far does the new growth go? Around the whole lakeshore?” Clarke asked.

“We didn’t explore it. Bellamy and I took off for Polis. Hoping to find out where everyone was. But all down the western shore and along the southern one, definitely new growth.”

“Roan’s been telling me about all the places where life is inching back,” Clarke said, her eyes on Roan’s profile. She could tell he was listening intently to every word. “Stream beds. Hollows up in the mountains. Culverts under broken roads. I was afraid to believe him.”

“Why?” Monty sounded genuinely baffled.

Clarke tried to explain herself, tried to find the words for something she was just coming to understand now. “Because sometimes I thought I heard static. On the radio. When I made my daily call to Bellamy. I was convinced that you all were listening but wouldn’t or couldn’t respond. But then it would be quiet again for long stretches. Weeks. Months sometimes. And you never replied. I got to be afraid that Roan and I were both imagining what we desperately wanted to be true, but wasn’t.”

Roan’s voice was gentle when he said, “You never told me that.”

Clarke kept her eyes on him as she stumbled through the words. “I thought I was, maybe, going a little mad. Maybe we both were. Who knew what the changes in our blood could be doing to our heads?”

“So calling me crazy to my face because you were afraid you actually were going crazy was the better plan?”

“It sounds really stupid when you say it like that.”

“It was stupid,” he said. He sounded more resigned than angry, though. “And you could have asked me to listen to the static.”

“It was really faint…” Clarke knew this sounded weak. It was weak. The sound had been weak. Hardly more than silence ringing in her ears.

“Did you ever think it could be another ship?” Monty asked curiously.

“Monty!” she exclaimed, “No! Never! What other ship? We were alone in space for three generations!”

“Well,” he shrugged, “The _Eligius_. It’s been inbound for six years.”

“You weren’t imagining the static, Clarke,” Roan said. “No more than I was imagining growing things in the mountains.”

“No. I wasn’t. I realize that now. And I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, either.”

“Hmm,” he grunted. Then he turned back around, facing the horizon ahead.

Madi leaned into Clarke’s side and whispered, “He’ll get over it. He always does.”

Clarke rested her cheek against Madi’s hair and whispered back. “Thanks, babe.”

“Do you think they heard all of your radio calls, or just some of them?” Monty asked.

“If the noise I thought I heard was them listening, then no.” Clarke shook her head. “But they landed practically on top of one of my prime broadcast spots. Make of that what you will.”

By mid-afternoon Roan was driving again, with Clarke in the front with him. The Rover’s windows were all open to catch the breeze, and they’d all long since stripped off most of their top layers in the heat. The late spring sun baking the flat earth under the tires, turning the dark interior of the Rover into an oven.

Under the glare of the hot afternoon light, the tall reeds and low grasses creeping a few feet to a dozen yards or more out from the edge of the lakeshore were all shades of pale green, some of them almost white against the dusty yellow-brown dirt. Clarke thought they were somehow both beautiful and fragile, though she knew they actually had to be tough as hell to be growing here and now.

As they circled north up the long western edge of the lakeshore, a small blue-grey smudge on the horizon gradually resolved into the landing ship Team Space had used to make their return to Earth.

“What the hell?” Clarke leaned forward to peer out the windshield. “That’s not a drop ship! That’s a full on landing shuttle!”

It reminded Clarke vaguely of the _Eligius_ , but it was a fraction the size, and far more gracefully designed.

“Didn’t we say that?” Monty said from the back. “I know I said that. Yeah. I definitely said that. It’s a landing vehicle. None of us wanted to just drop blind again. Hurl ourselves to the ground in another tin can and just hope for the best. No way. So we built ourselves a true landing ship. There were a couple of old station-to-station shuttles in the hanger bays. No one ever considered them for earth fall, I guess, because even the largest didn’t hold more than about a couple dozen people and none had much in the way of shielding. But that was plenty of room for us. We just had to make one of them ready for re-entry.”

“So, one trip and done?” Roan asked.

“No!” The pride in Monty’s voice was mountainous. “We took one of the small reactors from the artificial grav network to power her. She’ll fly for decades on that. Keep her in decent rig, she’s good to go.”

Clarke frowned, looking over her shoulder at Monty and Bellamy. “Go…where? Back to space?”

“Sure, if you wanted to. But also all over the Earth.”

“Holy shit.” Clarke sank back into her seat and contemplated the ship growing larger as they drew nearer. “You have a fucking plane.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy chuckled in agreement, his pride and satisfaction equally audible. “Yeah. We do.”

Roan slowed the Rover to a crawl as they drew nearer, and Clarke leaned forward to peer out of the windshield, keenly scrutinizing the scene ahead. The little vessel had been brought down in a wide meadow, flattening the tall grasses and a few scrabbly bushes a dozen meters or so back from the shoreline. The meadow filled the expanse between the lake and the rise of the hills on the edge of the shallow valley.

There was a long shallow ramp leading up to the main hatch doors. These were open to the afternoon sunlight, which was slanting across the near wing. The broad stubby wing itself was creating the only shade for miles around. In the shade was a person sitting in a low slung folding chair.

And in an open patch of ground between the ship and the lake and under the gaze of the watcher in the chair, a small child was playing in the dirt. Driving an ancient plastic truck along an elaborate system of roads and bridges built around towers of stones and twigs and logs.

A child. A child was playing in the dirt with a toy truck.

Clarke stared, transfixed.

Bellamy and Monty had neither one of them ever mentioned a child!

Had Team Space stumbled across another child out here in the wastes?

The Rover rolled to a stop just before the wing and the man, who turned out to be John Murphy – lanky, bearded, unalterably and always himself – rose to his feet.

Grit and pebbles scuffled loudly under Clarke’s boots in the quiet stillness of the late afternoon when she stepped out of the Rover. The gentle lapping of the water behind them was peaceful, and the Rover doors squeaking open and banging shut as the five of them clambered out seemed a terrible intrusion.

The child, a young boy Clarke thought, now that she could see him more clearly, sat back and stared at them in wonder. He was perhaps four years old. Maybe five, though she’d never been much good at guessing ages of small children.

Too small, in either case, too young, to have been born before the world ended.

He had a thick mop of dark curly hair falling well below his ears and across his forehead. His round cheeks were soft under his springy curls, and his full bottom lip had fallen open in amazement as he watched the newcomers spill out of the Rover.

The child got to his feet and drew closer to Murphy, his truck clutched in his square little hands.

His faded blue sleeveless tank and grey shorts, streaked with ochre dirt from hard outdoor play, left his sturdy little arms and legs exposed to the Earth’s bright sun. The late afternoon light burnished his skin to a warm copper hue.

Murphy dropped his hand to the boy’s head, gently ruffling his hair. “Go find your mom, kiddo, and tell her to come outside. We have visitors.”


	5. Chapter 5

The child vanished into the ship and Murphy came forward to greet Monty and Bellamy, seizing their hands and pulling them into generous back-pounding hugs. “Getting worried about you guys. Gonna start doing fly-overs soon no matter what you said about staying on the ground and out of sight.”

Bellamy laughed at this, and hugged Murphy back, but at the same time he said firmly, “Stick to the plan. Always stick to the plan.”

Murphy acknowledged this order with a quick wry twist of his lips, one that suggested that he took it as more of a guideline than a command.

Clarke smirked in delighted relief at this little exchange. Murphy, at least, was the same as he ever was. Some things, it seemed, were utterly reliable.

At the same time, she found it impossible to not try to guess at what the plan had been, or sort out why it bugged her so much that she hadn’t even known there’d been a plan more complicated than ‘find the people, find Clarke and Roan.’ She was so busy thinking about that, in fact, that she was almost startled when Murphy turned to her with a broad smile.

“Everyone kept saying I was the bad penny, always turning up. But here you are.” His grin encompassed both Clarke and Roan. “Emori swore the two of you would make it.”

He pulled Clarke into a full body embrace, warm and strong. Clarke remembered with aching recall that John Murphy gave a really good hug.

“I missed you, too,” she said, blinking fast against tears. “Every day.”

She even meant every word.

He let go and turned to Roan, holding out his out hand. When Roan took it, somewhat tentatively, Murphy pulled him into a shallow one-armed hug, too. “Raven’ll be very happy to see you, man. And so smug.”

Before Clarke could introduce Madi, who was hanging back behind them, a woman’s sharp voice echoing out of the open hatch drew their attention to the ship. “Hey! Slow down!”

The little boy came zooming out of the hatchway in a wide arc, his face alight with excitement. Halfway down the ramp, he caught the toe of his sandal on the ridged surface and started to fall.

Bellamy and Murphy had spun as one at the woman’s warning cry, but Bellamy was nearest and already in motion.

The child, too close to the edge, banged awkwardly to his knees and started to tumble off the side, headed for a nasty spill onto the hard-packed soil below.

Only Bellamy caught him, swinging him up high with a gently scolding, “Oof. Hey. That’s why we always tell you. No running on the ramps!”

Laughing in shock and relief, the little boy settled into Bellamy’s arms and wrapped his hands around Bellamy’s neck and hugged him tight.

Bellamy squeezed him back. “Good to see you, too.”

In the afternoon light, head to head, their soft dark curls were nearly the same richest, deepest, shade of brown, so closely matched it was impossible to see where one stopped and the other began. The golden copper of the skin on their bare arms glowed in the same warm tones.

So alike, Clarke realized, as to be… kin. They could be parent and child.

Father and son.

Clarke’s heart slowed to an impossible degree, almost as though time stopped, while the staggering thought seized her, wrenching her consciousness into new directions. New ideas contorted the past and present and bent the future into strange new shapes.

Bellamy… had fathered a child while he was in space.

Six years was a long time, her brain reminded her. Anything was possible.

_But_ , her heart cried, _that?_

In that same strange moment of suspended animation she recalled every misgiving that she and Roan had shared between them. Each inkling they’d had that Bellamy and Monty were holding something back. Keeping something secret. Keeping something hidden.

_Plans_ , Bellamy had said to Murphy. He’d had plans that Murphy and the rest were supposed to follow.

Roan had been right. Skaikru and their secrets.

Clarke felt tiny fissures spread across her still heart, and she bit down hard at the inside of her lip to keep any sign of her distress from leaking out.

He could have just told her. He should have just told her. He shouldn’t blindside her like this! Put her through this shock in front of everyone. In front of Madi!

At the thought of Madi, time started again with a whump, her heart cracked and broke, and Clarke nearly whirled around, only to find Madi was already at her shoulder. Madi was as transfixed by the child as Clarke had been, openly goggling at Bellamy and the boy.

Raven and Echo strode quickly into view in the open hatch just then, both of them scanning quickly for the child.

“Look who we found!” Bellamy said, gesturing with his head to Clarke, Madi and Roan.

To Clarke’s chagrin he seemed so relieved as he announced them, as though a heavy burden were falling away. The weight of secrets. Of Plans. Of things kept back.

Could he really care so little for the hurt he was causing her? Was he even _aware_ of the hurt he was causing her?

The women’s heads swiveled almost as one, turning from the child and Bellamy to the newcomers at the base of the ramp. Both of them immediately stopped dead in their tracks, rocking onto their heels. At almost the same time, Harper and Emori appeared behind Echo. They froze, too, as soon as they saw Roan staring up at Raven.

And Clarke knew – everyone knew – the instant Raven’s gaze fell on Roan.

When she saw him at the base of the ramp, her face transformed. Lit up with a smile so radiant it was like a starburst seen from space. Or no, Clarke thought, steadier and more brilliant. The dawn sun breaking over the edge of the earth.

Raven was immediately in motion, almost floating down the ramp. Headed straight for the man who’d spent the last six years staring up at the stars and waiting for her.

Clarke became aware that the whole of Team Space was riveted by the long-awaited reunion playing out in front of them.

Even Bellamy and the child were focused on Raven and Roan. Bellamy and his son. Bellamy, his son, and his son’s mother. Bellamy and… who?

Clarke couldn't even bear to finish that thought in her head.

Then despite herself she recalled the sound of a woman’s voice, cautioning the little boy as he dashed out of the ship. A mother’s warning. A mother’s cry. Followed immediately by Echo’s appearance.

_Echo_.

Who had such a complicated history with Bellamy in the few months they’d known each other on Earth, those months right after the Ark fell. From the cages at Mount Weather to Nia’s betrayal of Lexa to Roan’s banishment to Bellamy talking her down from suicide and then taking her to space.

Echo, who also looked so lovely. Clarke cast her gaze up at her again, searching out Echo at the top of the ramp, finding her standing tall and slim between Harper and Emori, the sun shining off her dark hair. As beautiful as Raven in her own way, her hair loose and flowing down her back, her long legs made even longer by the tall boots she favored.

In fact all of Team Space looked good, Clarke thought, darting another quick look around at them all. So damn good. Healthy. Strong. Straight backs and square shoulders. Eyes bright. Hair shiny. Tanned from the sun. All their visible scars from the past long since fully healed.

Raven was walking towards Roan with barely a limp. Harper’s eyes were clear. Monty’s hands were so completely healed there was no sign of any old injury at all. Even Emori’s twisted and elongated fingers seemed smoother and healthier, stronger and more graceful than before. Bellamy was beautiful. And he was holding his strong, sturdy, healthy son firmly in his arms.

Clarke let herself practice thinking that. Got ready to fix a smile to her face when the inevitable moment of introduction arrived. Bellamy’s and Echo’s son. She ignored the hollowness in her chest, where her heart had already shattered into a million tiny irretrievable pieces.

Six years was a long time. Space was cold and empty. Who was she to begrudge anyone companionship or love?

She’d built her own little family, here on earth, and she loved them, and they loved her, and that would have to be enough. Her heart would heal. It always did. It was an amazing organ. She knew this. Earth had given her plenty of opportunity to learn.

No one but Clarke was looking at Bellamy and the child. Bellamy’s child.

Clarke ripped her gaze away from them.

All the members of Team Space were still watching Raven. The three women in particular, up at the top of the ramp. Harper, Echo, and Emori, were gazing after Raven with such sentimental expressions they looked like a flock of sisters…or aunties, or no, the image came at last to Clarke from ancient vids, like bridesmaids.

As for Raven herself?

She was glowing. Exultant. Her tawny skin burnished bronze by the afternoon light, her dark hair glistening, streaked with highlights burned red-gold by weeks on the ground. Her brilliant eyes luminous, her teeth blindingly white, her full red lips seeming swollen already from kisses yet to fall.

Clarke found she was already smiling just to look at Raven.

Raven’s was joy so large it was reaching out to bathe everything around her in its radiance.

See, Clarke assured herself, already her heart could beat again. Healing already in the warmth of Raven’s smile.

Roan had stopped at the base of the ramp and he was simply staring up at Raven. His triumphant expression rivaling hers. All his years of pain and suffering falling away, revealing the charmingly handsome man he’d so seldom had the chance to be.

When Raven drew close enough she could have reached out to touch him, she drifted to a halt and said, “I’m afraid I’m dreaming.”

Roan shook his head at her, his grin wider than before, his teeth glinting in the sun. “Not dreaming.”

Raven locked her eyes on his face, and then lifted one challenging eyebrow. “Anyone going to want to stab me if I kiss you?”

Roan simply shook his head at her again, apparently filled with nothing but delight by her test. He damn near giggled as he replied. “No. You?”

Clarke felt an incredulously joyful sob blooming in her chest, and fresh tears welling up behind her eyes.

Raven Reyes, practically emitting light from sheer gladness, had just transformed Roan kom Azgeda, formidable survivor of the very worst the world could throw at him, into the most adorable version possible of his long-vanished sixteen-year-old self.

Roan had been waiting and watching and hoping for this moment for six years, and here it was.

They’d waited and watched for this together, Clarke and Roan. They’d confessed their fears, shared their hopes, sometimes even cried a little. But mostly reassured each other that this day would come. Their loved ones would return to the Earth and they would all be reunited. It would be worth all the pain and the fear and the danger to hold them in their arms again. When their hearts would be made whole.

And for Roan, it was happening. Just like they’d dreamed. It was fucking perfect.

Clarke pressed her fingers to her lips to keep them from trembling, her smile wider than her hands.

Raven, dragging her full lower lip through her white teeth while she grinned victoriously, was shaking her head back at Roan. “Nope. No one in my life like that.”

Raven’s own eyes were glassy now with unshed tears. Roan’s tears were already starting to leak down his cheeks, disappearing into his beard.

Everyone else was blinking frantically, clearing away their vision. Or like Harper, already wiping their faces. Grinning and nodding and sniffling and casting shining eyes at each other in open and enthusiastic relief at the scene unfolding before them. Even Bellamy was bobbing his head in approval.

Clarke became aware that her tears were already dripping into her mouth.

She checked on Madi. Madi, whom she and Roan had raised between them on enough ancient fairytales and Azgedan Epics to choke a horse, Clarke realized.

Madi actually had her hands clasped under her chin and her mouth was hanging open in an expression of total glee.

Clarke wrapped her arms around her from behind and hugged her tight, resting her chin against Madi’s hair and whispering toward her ear, “Pretty amazing, yeah?”

“So amazing!” Madi breathed, leaning back into Clarke’s embrace with a deeply contented sigh. “Like a story!”

Roan had drifted closer to Raven until there was no space left between them. When he bent his head and she raised hers, he didn’t even seem to rush. He brushed a loose strand of hair away from her forehead, slipping his hand slowly around behind her neck as he bowed closer. He brushed his thumbs over the curve of her cheeks, wiping away her tears. Then, tilting his head just enough, he touched her lips with his.

Then Raven fisted her hands in his shirt and yanked him down, or herself up on her toes, or both, pressing her mouth to his, open and hungry. He responded instantly, pulling her into his arms, nearly lifting her off her feet. Holding on as though he planned to spend the rest of his life kissing her as thoroughly as he could.

And all around her Clarke felt the sensation of a collective sigh. The broad grins on the faces of Team Space were softening to satisfied smiles as they looked to each other, drying their faces, something settling comfortably between them.

When Clarke looked back, she saw that Raven had buried her face in Roan’s neck and he’d pressed his face against her hair. They were just standing with their arms locked around each other, eyes closed, gently rocking back and forth.

It was perfect. It was beautiful. And for Roan’s sake, for the sake of her friend and her confidant, the found-brother she’d never expected to gain in the burned wastes of a dead planet, Clarke’s spirits were soaring and her tender heart was aching.

And deep in her chest the bitterest of bitter worms was turning. Because this was her dream, too, damn it. The meadow. The sun. The eagerly returning lover. The passionate kisses and the ardent embraces.

And she hadn’t gotten any of it. Not one fucking shred of it.

She’d tried to tell herself it was because Earth sucked and no one ever got what they wanted.

But nope. Clearly some people did. Just not her.

That she wouldn’t have wanted the weeping audience was the meanest of ashy comforts.

Finally, with a deep audible sigh and another flurry of tender lingering kisses, Raven stepped back, swiping her cheeks with her hands and smiling brilliantly at Roan. She immediately turned to Clarke and held out her arms.

“We all owe you everything. There will never be a way to say how much.” And then she was reaching to envelop Clarke in a hug so firm it hovered on the edge of painful.

“Thank you.” Raven’s rough whisper burred across Clarke’s ears. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Clarke hugged Raven back and furiously sniffled away more tears. She reminded herself that she did have many blessings. She had her friends who were glad to see her. She had her own found family, and their happiness. She had Madi.

And Raven was here, and whole, and healthy, and happy. Exactly as Clarke had spent six years hoping for, every single day. That like so many long awaited events the arrival wasn’t providing all the perfect joy she’d built up for it was her own damn fault.

She turned and saw that Roan had come to stand behind Madi, his hands on her shoulders, and Madi was beaming up at him while he grinned down at her.

Clarke held out her hand, which Madi took instantly, and then she drew her closer. With a voice hoarse with emotion, she said, “Raven, I’d like to introduce you to Madi, my foster daughter.”

Raven beamed. “Madi! What a pleasure to meet you!” She held out her hands and then clasped Madi’s tentatively outstretched fingers with both of her own. “Any new member of Clarke’s family is a member of ours, too. I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better and hearing all your stories.”

She dropped Madi’s hands and stepped back, “But first there’s someone I’d like you all to meet.”

Then Raven – Raven? Clarke felt the whole Earth begin to tremble wildly underfoot. She wondered why she didn’t stumble or fall over.

Raven walked over to Bellamy and held out her arms.

The little boy promptly reached out his own arms and fell right into Raven’s embrace.

Clarke’s heart, tender and fragile and just barely recovering, pinched tight and strange in her chest. She’d been so sure! She’d had it all settled in her head. Echo! Echo was supposed to be the boy’s mother. Echo, who wouldn’t have Ark-issued birth control to prevent accidental conception. Echo, who could have gotten pregnant in those early days when Bellamy had been refusing to accept Emori’s faith in a one in a million chance that Clarke would survive.

She decided it. Bellamy had been so weird and distant because he was guarding the secret of his own child. With Echo! Echo, who shared a history with Bellamy, complicated and messy, but dark and intimate all the same.

Not Raven! How could it be Raven? Raven, who was so thrilled to see Roan? Who’d walked straight into his arms immediately after assuring him that there was no one else in her life? Or in her heart?

Was this why Bellamy was so closed off? Because he didn’t want to share his son with his son’s mother’s lover? Didn’t want to tell Clarke about this huge alteration in his life?

Clarke’s head was spinning so quickly as she tried to parse what was happening, while it was all happening, all in frantic microseconds’ worth of time, she actually felt faintly dizzy. Why couldn’t Bellamy have confessed the whole to her? Let her know what he was feeling and why? And to Roan? Why have them both walk into all of this…this horrible messy agony…blind?

She looked wildly at Bellamy then, hoping to see something in his face. Find some explanation that would make this whole horrible twist on what was supposed to be a fairytale ending go away.

Bellamy met her eyes, almost as though he were waiting for her glance, and then immediately his expression darkened, his lips tightening as he folded his empty arms across his chest.

Clarke’s fragile new heart withered and died.

Raven turned to face Clarke and Roan, holding the boy slung on her canted hip, her arm around his waist, his leg dangling lose against her thigh. Her child. Clinging to his mother.

And now Clarke could see clearly how this child could be Raven’s. _Was Raven’s_. The shape of her face. Her coloring. Her build.

Raven said to them, “This is Daniel. Daniel Reyes. My son.”

She slid him to the ground beside her, her hands on his shoulders, looking down to catch his eyes. “Danny, this is Clarke.” Raven waved in Clarke’s direction. “You know all about her.”

He nodded shyly at Clarke. Lost in a haze, Clarke automatically lifted her fingers and waggled them in a vague little wave, nodding and smiling back at him.

It was the first time she’d let herself really look at him, she realized.

He was heartbreakingly adorable, with a sharp little chin and a wide smile under that mop of soft curls. A completely unexpected urge to reach down and stroke his hair seized her. It took an act of will to force it away.

Raven turned her son to look to Clarke’s side. “And this big girl with Clarke is her foster daughter Madi. We’ll have time to get to know her later. And this man...” Raven crouched down beside Danny, turning him once more, her hand around his hips, holding him close to her. “Remember I told you that once we got to Earth we’d do everything we could to find out what happened to your dad?”

Danny nodded solemnly at her, nearly vibrating with intense focus.

Clarke realized she was nearly vibrating as well. If they _had to come to Earth_ to find out what happened to Danny’s father, then his father was _**Not Bellamy**_.

Danny Reyes was not Bellamy’s son.

Not. Bellamy’s. Son.

Relief so powerful it was a physical sensation swept over Clarke. It started at her feet and rose all the way to the top of her head. Lifting her. Making her feel like she was floating. Her tension and unhappiness falling away with the release of knowing Danny Reyes was not Bellamy’s son. She hadn’t lost Bellamy. Not completely. Not yet. There was still a chance for her.

Almost as quickly as that notion formed in her head, Clarke recoiled, mortified that those were the words she’d thought. She’d actually mourned for a horrible devastating moment the loss of Bellamy, not to death, but to a family of his own. How miserable and selfish a human being could she possibly be?

In the midst of the long-wished-for reunion with Team Space – everyone was alive, and healthy, and they’d even added a member! – she’d lost precious moments caught up in what turned out to be an entirely imaginary tragedy of her own making.

Her romantic fantasies about Bellamy Blake had slipped their traces, grown from idle daydreaming into something she’d counted on. Expected. Was crushed by when they hadn’t unfolded as she’d hoped. She’d even dared to be angry with him! Over a fidelity to future she’d had no right to expect and that he’d never even violated in any case.

Her ears were fine. The static on the radios had been real. But she hadn’t been wrong to have feared the power of her imagination.

“Well, he found us first,” Raven was saying to the child beside her. “Because he’s pretty amazing like that. Danny,” Raven gestured to the man in front of them, “this is your dad. Roan.”

The little boy promptly buried his face in Raven’s hair, and then he peeked one eye out at Roan, who sank to his knees before his son.

Clarke’s own knees felt weak and her throat felt full.

She was _such_ an _idiot_.

Such a fucking idiot. This was so obviously the right and perfect answer. Roan. Roan was Danny’s father.

She could not believe she hadn’t seen this immediately. What was it that Roan was always telling her? That the whole world didn’t actually spin around her ass?

This child had literally nothing to do with her at all. Or through her, by extension and some sort of weird principle of transference, with Bellamy Blake. In no way, shape or form, other than that their mutual friends had become parents.

“Daniel?” Roan’s voice was so soft, his gaze locked on his son as he leaned toward him. “I’m so glad to meet you.”

Danny turned his head enough to peer cautiously out at the man before him, but said nothing.

Roan filled in the silence, his tone calm and easy, sinking down now to rest on his heels and talking directly to Danny, who gradually lifted his head as he listened intently to his father’s voice.

“Your mom showed me how to find the Ark in the night sky a long time ago. I’ve been keeping watch on the Ark almost every night since she went to space. So I was watching when your ship came in,” Roan nodded at the shuttle, “and I saw your trail in the sky. That’s how I knew where you landed. Here, by the lake. That’s how I found Bellamy and Monty, when they were on their way to Polis. And then we went to get Clarke and Madi, and bring them here, too.”

“And then you found us!” Danny lifted his head fully to remind him, clearly bringing the story around to the most important part of the tale, and wrapped his arm around Raven’s neck. “Mama and me!”

“Yes. Then I found you,” Roan laughed gently. He held out his hands to his sides, open and easy, and grinned broadly. “I found you, too.”

At that Danny launched himself at Roan, so suddenly Roan actually rocked from the impact as he caught him, and hugged him fiercely. Roan met Raven’s eyes over their son’s head, his light eyes wide with emotion, and then she was wrapping her arms around him, too, raining hard little kisses across his cheeks and brow. Then they were murmuring words too low for the rest of them to share.

Murphy suddenly let out a wild whistle and started clapping and stamping his feet. Monty and Emori immediately picked it up, and then everyone else followed, more applause and cheers and laughter filling the air.

Madi leaned close to Clarke to whisper in a vaguely dumbfounded way, “Roan has a kid of his own?”

“Yeah,” Clarke replied, chuckling quietly in shock and sniffling hard. “Looks like Roan has a kid of his own!”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Clarke agreed, meeting Madi’s eyes as they both nodded slowly. “Just. Wow.”

The intimacy of the little reunion was by then too much and everyone sort of shuffle-spun away, leaving Raven and Roan as much privacy as they could. Clarke looked up to see the three women heading down the ramp and straight for her, their faces wreathed in welcoming grins.

For a confused stretch of time there was a general cheerful hubbub of laughter and hugs and slapping backs. Everyone embraced Clarke, most of them at least twice, and exclaimed over Madi, and welcomed her four or five times each.

Madi had grown used to Bellamy and Monty fairly easily, and the respectful distance they kept, but another group of excited people crowding around all at once was shaking even Madi’s generous store of self-confidence. She hung close by Clarke’s side and her smiles grew a little strained.

Clarke broke apart from yet another hug from Harper, who couldn’t seem to stop exclaiming “You’re here! You have a daughter!” to see that Roan and Raven had climbed to their feet again.

Danny was swinging on his mother’s hand and staring up at his father with an expression of awestruck wonder as they chatted animatedly with Monty and Emori.

“I’m sorry we didn’t give you more of a head’s up. Springing Danny on you like that was a surprise, I know.”

Bellamy’s voice behind her made Clarke flinch. He’d hung back in the press of the hugs and the hellos, letting the crew who’d stayed behind with the landing ship get their fill of greeting the newcomers.

She’d tried to keep track of him in the crush, he’d even smiled tentatively at her a few times, given her a brief nod of acknowledgement, so she knew he was looking for a moment with her. That he’d sought her out so soon sent adrenaline rushing through her veins, and she wasn't even going to try to pretend to herself it didn’t.

Clarke raised her brows at this opening line. “A surprise? You’d think we’d all have run out of understatements by now.”

Bellamy bobbed his head ruefully. “We’d promised Raven, on pain of unnamed but vile mechanical threats, that it was her story to tell.”

“It was her story,” Clarke agreed, aiming for understanding but ending up at tart. “But it was also Roan’s. Three weeks you made us wait. We both knew you were holding something back. It was making us a little crazy.”

“We gave her our word. None of us thought it would be three weeks. A few days at most. But it was one of those secrets, the longer you keep it, the more awkward it got. And I couldn’t break my promise.”

He lifted his chin with that, and Clarke got the idea he while he’d meant to offer an apology, it’d got lost somewhere along the way. It ended up a defense of his own choices.

Just as if it’d hadn’t ever occurred to him that she might spend several horrible, heart-breaking minutes thinking he was Danny’s father. That he’d gotten together with Echo, or Raven herself, and established his own family in space.

Not a found family, like hers here on Earth, patched together from three lost people who were all that was left of their respective clans, clinging to one another in the last green space on the planet. But a natural family. Grown by two people coming together in love and hope and choosing to bring a new child into the world.

Sure. Yes. What were minutes compared to years? Nothing. Technically.

But in practice? Plenty of time for her heart to shatter. That’s how much time.

Time for her to think that all her romantic hopes and dreams for what it would be to have a second chance with Bellamy were all so much bullshit. Built on a tissue of fantasies and romance stories and heroic legends… and about as durable.

Not that he could possibly know she’d’ve thought such a thing, or that she’d’ve been so devastated by the mere idea of it. But it wasn’t an impossibly crazy notion! Even as she thought it, Clarke was guiltily aware that to even begin to hold him responsible for her wild emotional swings was monstrously unfair.

“You know,” Clarke swallowed hard, cleared her throat and tried again. She realized she desperately needed a little space to clear the fog out of her head. Straighten herself out with what was real and true, what she’d wished for, what was possible, and what might not be. “Until a few days ago, my whole world was only me and Madi. Even Roan wasn’t due back for weeks. Then came the _Eligius_ , and now you’re all here and we’re together, and Danny…”

Clarke raised her hand in the general direction of the newly-formed little family, lifting her eyes in time to see Roan with his arm around Madi’s shoulders as Raven bent her head to encourage Danny to say something to Clarke’s daughter.

Every mothering instinct Clarke had cultivated in the last five years sprang into high alert.

Madi hadn’t seen another child since she’d barely been older than Danny was now, not since the old world had died. Danny had NEVER seen another child, period, in his entire life. Socialization with other children was one of the things Clarke had fretted about for years. Or rather, she’d fretted about how little of it Madi had. How this might affect her ability to form strong and healthy adult relationships later on. Danny would have been in exactly the same situation.

This first meeting between them would be crucial. It would set the tone for everything between them, and for them, forever.

Clarke discovered she couldn’t just stand by and let it pass at a distance.

“Bellamy,” she glanced up at him, almost, but not quite actually, shifting from foot to foot in her need to leap across the intervening space, “Madi and Danny, this first meeting, I…” Clarke stumbled out of words and flapped her hand instead.

Bellamy looked taken aback, and disappointed, and for a split second Clarke wavered, but then he followed the direction of her hand. His expression cleared instantly and he actually smiled a little and nodded in understanding. “Of course. Big day for both kids. Go on. We’ll talk later.”

Clarke was already moving, but she looked over her shoulder.

Bellamy was standing more at his ease, his weight canted on one leg, his arms loose at his sides, watching her with a warm expression on his face. Now, in the late afternoon light, the beard and the shaggy hair seemed less like a mask and more like earned maturity and wisdom. He lifted his chin, gesturing at the children, and mouthed, ‘Go!’

For the very first time since he’d been on the ground, Clarke felt like she was seeing the Bellamy she remembered. She grinned in relief. She raised her fingers in a quick salute, before turning for Madi. “Thanks. Later. I promise.”


	6. Chapter 6

Clarke still really needed a minute, or ten, or even twenty, to herself, but it was proving near impossible to tear herself away from Team Space. Whenever she thought she’d found her exit opportunity, someone else would ask her another question. About the Green, about the changed world, about Polis, about the _Eligius_ , about Madi.

And so she stayed.

The late-day sun was still warm on her arms, though the early evening breezes coming over the surface of the lake were slowly pulling the most oppressive heat out from the air. More chairs and stools had appeared around the fire pit. Pitchers and tumblers and canteens of water and bowls of roasted snacks were being passed around. Murphy was beginning to talk of lighting up the fire and setting up his cooking equipment for the evening meal.

Finally, Clarke realized she was going to have to create her own covering distraction if she wanted to get away without making a scene. The last thing she wanted to do was to call attention to herself and then have everyone feel the need to apologize. She rose to her feet at the next break in the conversation, Madi’s name on her lips, mothering responsibilities at the ready, and turned to find Harper approaching.

“Hey,” Harper smiled. “If you like, I could give you quick a tour of the ship, and show you where you’ll be bunking?”

“Oh, no.” Clarke shook her head, hoping she didn’t look or sound as panicky as she felt at the thought of sleeping on the floor near, but not too near, far but not far enough, from Bellamy, for endless nights running. Not while the state of her relationship with him was so entirely uncertain and the future so unknown. “That’s not necessary. Madi and I are used to sleeping in the Rover. We’ve got mats and sleeping bags. We’ll be fine.”

She grinned, she hoped not maniacally, to cover her dismay.

Harper blinked at Clarke’s intensity, but held onto her smile. “It’s small, I know! But we have plenty of space for the three of you. We had years to remodel. We’ve got private berths. You’ll be sharing but you’ll have a bed. And a door. And we’ve got a head with hot and cold running water. There’s no way that’s not better than a sleeping bag on the floor of the Rover.”

Clarke realized she had to accept this offer with grace. After listening to this list of amenities – beds! doors! running hot and cold water! – anything less would appear completely bonkers to her old friends. Besides, she told herself, Madi would wonder what on earth was wrong with her to pass up such a treat as to sleep on a space ship. Also, in all honesty, it really did sound much nicer than sleeping in a truck and peeing on the ground.

She climbed the ramp and entered Team Space’s landing vehicle arm-in-arm with Harper. On the inside the ship was small, almost cramped. However it was exactly as Harper described. What had once been open crew seating and a generous cargo bay had been ripped out and repurposed to six small berths, three on a side, with an equally small crew area in front.

“Engines in the rear and on the sides under the wings, cockpit in the front, very teeny tiny cargo hold underneath. Small head and galley behind the cockpit. That’s it.” Harper spun in the tight hallway between the berths, her arms out like a tour guide and her fingertips just brushing the walls. “It took all the shielding we could strip from everything else to make it. But it held like a charm. We didn’t lose a single exterior panel on entry. And don’t think Raven hasn’t been superior as all hell about that ever since.”

“It’s fantastic,” Clarke said, spinning slowly around in an echo of Harper and taking it all in. “Really fucking incredible what you guys accomplished.”

“Roan will obviously be in with Raven,” Harper said with an arch smile, gesturing at one of the two doors closest to the engine compartments.

“Um, yes,” Clarke agreed, quite unable to contain her answering smirk.

Raven and Roan were not being rude or embarrassing in any way, but they also hadn’t strayed out of arm’s reach of each other since reuniting.

“Murphy and Emori share here, Bellamy has this one. Those three berths all have one larger bed apiece.” Harper quickly pointed to each door as she named the occupants. “These three sleep four each, two bunk sets per berth. Echo and I are sharing this one, Monty took that one there. And Danny’s in this one across from Raven. I thought Madi might like to bunk with him?”

Clarke nodded, feeling a bit breathless as Harper rattled through all the room arrangements.

“And you get to choose,” Harper said. “There’s extra bunks with the kids, with me and Echo, and with Monty.”

“I…” Clarke squashed away the information that Bellamy had a berth with one larger bed as clearly irrelevant. She also tried not to feel in any way hurt or unhappy that Harper had also realized it was irrelevant. “I think Madi will be most comfortable, at least at first, if I stay with her and Danny.”

Harper nodded in understanding, reaching over to the door release. “I thought she might.”

The recessed lighting came up to reveal that it was a tightly designed space, with just enough room between the bunks on either side for a large person to turn around. A small pile of toys and children’s board books filled one rumpled lower bed, and had spread across to the other lower bunk as well.

Harper stepped in and swept up the toys off the unclaimed bunk, depositing them onto the rumpled blankets of the occupied one. “I suspect these were part of a game layout, and there will be pouting that I moved them, but he will survive.”

She looked up at Clarke. “Anything else I can show you right now? Questions?”

“No, I think I’ve got everything for now. But,” Clarke seized her chance and gestured in the direction of the head, “I’ll take a minute, if that’s okay?”

When she came out, the public sections of the small ship were cool and empty, with the only light coming from the sun spilling through the open hatch and into the crew area and down the short hall. Clarke looked around, and then darted past the open hatch to the small berth she’d been assigned and slipped in. When the door hissed shut, she sank onto the cleared-off lower bunk, pressed the heels of her hands into her temples and just breathed. In and out, slow relaxing breaths, until her pulse finally returned to her normal resting pace.

Kicking off her boots, she pulled her legs under her, closed her eyes and set herself to think.

Somewhere along the line, what she’d thought were her carefully hidden private dreams for private times, as she’d called them to herself, had clearly escaped those bounds. Leaked into her actual dreams, her actual hopes, her actual semi-plans for a future once Team Space returned to Earth.

Those dreams had all been focused around not merely a romantic reunion with Bellamy, but also a romantic future. On one level, of course, she was fully aware of this. She and Roan had spent endless hours comparing their romantic hopes.

It had always been a somewhat frustrating experience for Clarke. His had all involved reuniting with an actual lover. Not merely a lover, but in fact someone with whom he had actually exchanged the totemic words, “I love you.”

Before he’d left the island, some premonition, some stray sixth sense, must have seized Raven. She’d warned him not to die before she got to Polis. _“Because I love you, you dick.”_

A phrase he’d treasured until it had worn thin and fine in his memory. He’d tried, he’d told Clarke once, to carve it into his skin, alone in the wastes before they'd found each other. But their new nightblood didn’t allow for such frivolous self-harm. He’d never been able to make a lasting scar, and had eventually given up the attempt.

He did have the relief of having returned the words, however, and with no backhanded endearment attached.

Clarke? She’d had nothing but a tattered collection of lingering looks, last-minute embraces, stray touches, halting almost-confessions, or what she’d hoped were confessions, but she didn’t really know, now did she?

She also had the knowledge that she’d locked Bellamy in a boiler room, and then held a gun on him and threatened to kill him, barely a day before he’d left Earth for the last time. Who knew how that tainted his memories of her?

Whenever she listed these things off, Roan would guffaw, and then he would sigh, and then he would list over and over again all the times she and Bellamy had risked death for each other. Traded away lives for each other. Sacrificed their people for each other.

He said he knew Lexa had had tattoos, so if they could figure out how to make the ink that nightblood would tolerate, he’d happily write it all over her arms and legs for her if it would help.

“Bellamy Blake loves you. I’ve seen a lot of things, and I’ve never seen a man who loves a woman as desperately as he loves you.”

She would always snort then, and toss something at him, or declare she was going to bed if Roan was going to keep talking nonsense.

But somewhere … sometime she’d started to believe. Believe so hard that her whole world had shattered during the five short minutes when she’d believed Bellamy had left her behind and built a new family. That he had fathered a child with Echo, or even for one shell-shocked minute, with Raven.

Bellamy hadn’t done any such thing, of course.

Clarke knew that now, too. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was her. Her hopes, her dreams. What was real in her past with Bellamy. What she had only imagined. What she had built up too much.

What could she expect from Bellamy going forward? Fairly. Not out of some starry-eyed dreams imposed on him out of her loneliness, or by the persuasions of a man willing to carve romantic declarations into his own arm. But in the bright light of the sun, on an almost but not quite dead planet – what could she hope for? What could she count on? What could she ask for?

She didn’t know the answers yet, she realized. But surely having the right questions was a good beginning?

~~~~

Eventually Clarke accepted that simply speculating about the probable answers to her questions while sitting on her ass inside the ship was going to resolve nothing.

So she forced herself out of the quiet berth, and wandered outside. Stepping out of the hatch and shielding her eyes against the deeply slanting red rays of the evening sun, she found that preparations for the evening meal were well underway. A fire was burning brightly and already heating up a grate for grilling something. Murphy was giving directions and pointing to various things with the knife in his hand.

“No! Not that pot!” he was exclaiming, “The bigger one. And slice those green oniony things thinner, okay?”

The children were playing on the edge of the lakeshore, splashing in the water as they chased minnows. Two children! Such unbelievable riches already, Clarke thought. They didn’t need some strangers, some grim, dying, infighting refugees from an ancient bizarre attempt to mine asteroids with convicts to bolster their numbers. They could do this themselves, Team Space and the Wunkru. Bellamy was out of his mind to want to make friends with the _Eligius_ inmates for no reason other than their bodies, their genetic material.

As for Danny and Madi, Clarke thought that their initial meeting had really gone quite well. Danny had been pleasantly willing to be awed by Madi. Madi in turn had been graciously pleased to allow that Danny’s Trigedasleng, thanks to the efforts of Echo and Emori, was quite acceptable. Danny beamed. Madi felt superior. Each departed quite satisfied by the encounter, and apparently were willing now to engage in some play.

“There you are!” Bellamy met her at the base of the ramp.

“I took a few minutes.” Clarke told him, pleased by his tone of relieved discovery, and by his smile. It appeared she could expect that he would notice if she was missing, and that she could count on him being happy to see her when she returned. “Thinking with my eyes closed.”

“Ah.” He nodded sagely. “That’s what we’re calling naps these days?”

Clarke waved this faint attempt at a wisecrack away, her attention captured by the bustle of the little camp, which already seemed much bigger and busier than when they’d arrived. “What’s all this?”

“Dinner. And we thought we’d get the Rover unloaded, but Roan said we should wait for you.”

Bellamy ended this on an extremely dubious note, making it clear that listening to Roan or following his recommendation regarding her preferences was something he’d allowed only because he hadn’t been able to figure out how to avoid it.

Clarke turned to see that Roan, Raven and Monty were all leaning up against the Rover, clearly waiting on her. Roan, in the meantime, was entirely absorbed by something Raven was saying to him, her hands flying through the air as she spoke. Monty waved cheerily when he saw Clarke looking over at them.

Clarke wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t embarrassed, not at all, but as with all the arrangements of their lives in the Green, now that they were open to Bellamy’s examination and judgment she found herself second-guessing everything. Which she immediately rejected as absurd. She’d done a heck of a job getting herself and Madi and Roan through the last six years, each of them relatively whole and happy and mostly sane.

She lifted her chin. “Yeah, I kind of have a thing about knowing where everything of mine is. There’s so little in the world, each find is pretty precious to me. So it’s just easier if I’m there when we pack, and when we unpack.”

“Come on, then.” He didn’t shrug. But Clarke felt that he implied the shrug. “We’ll get you all settled in. Though maybe we can deal with the weapons tomorrow? Getting into the cargo hold is a pain. It involves lifting up the floor panels.”

Clarke also tried not to bristle about the weapons. Her weapons. Obviously they had to get them under better cover than tarps on the top of the Rover. But just turning them over to Team Space, and putting them in a place that was by Bellamy’s own admission a pain in the ass to get in or out of, didn’t immediately strike her as a grand idea. But there would be time tomorrow to talk it over, she told herself.

With so many hands they made short work of the job. Clarke’s food stores were an especially welcome addition. Murphy fell on the salt and dried herbs in particular with cries of delight.

Clutching the small sacks to his chest he proclaimed, “You are a hero to me. No longer _Wanheda_ , I dub you, ‘Spicebringer’ and declare this day your day. To be celebrated more than all other days in the world to come.”

“That’s the best name anyone has ever given me. I accept with pride,” Clarke laughed.

After that the whirl of preparations seemed to have no place for her. A dance where everyone else knew the steps and the best thing for her to do was get out of the way.

She retreated to the far edge of the fire, finding the heat welcome now that the sun was touching the horizon, and looked thoughtfully up at the ship, wondering if she wanted to retrieve a sweater from her things. And if she should grab one for Madi while she was at it.

“It has a name, you know,” Bellamy said, coming over to stand with her, once again seeking her out from the crowd. Clarke told herself two was only a coincidence. She needed three for a pattern. Three to know it was more. Three to know it was real.

“What does?” she asked.

“Our ship.” Bellamy reached out for her elbow and gently pulled her around so that she could see the nose.

Clarke tried not to be so completely consumed by the heat of his fingers on her skin that she couldn’t focus on anything else. It proved almost impossible.

Bellamy pointed to it. “See?”

“Yes.” Clarke nodded vaguely, still mostly focused on the touch of his hand. She’d noticed the nose-painting earlier in the afternoon. A large painted sigil, a crest. A black silhouette. Wings. The mark of the ship’s builder. “Raven’s mark.”

Bellamy gave her an odd look. “No. Look again.”

Clarke did. Saw the head of a bird in profile, the curved beak of a raptor, the extended wings, the front claws… she tilted her head. The claws extended out from the body of a mammal. She squinted. Claws extended out from the hindquarters of a beast with two large padded rear feet and a long tufted tail.

And all at once it resolved. Head of an eagle, body of a lion.

She turned to Bellamy, her eyes wide with surprise. “A Gryphon?”

He was grinning broadly at her as he dropped his hand and stepped a little away, sweeping his arm in a wide arc that took in the whole of the small vessel. “Yes. That’s what we named our ship. After our hero and deliverer. The _Gryphon_.”

“Oh,” was all Clarke could choke out, her throat too full to allow any other sound to pass. She looked back and forth between Bellamy and the ship, the _Gryphon_ , and smiled unsteadily instead, blinking away the wetness in her eyes.

She would have thought she had used up all the tears she had to spill this day, but she would have thought wrong. They had named their ship for her.

They had _**named their ship for her**_.

It had just been sitting there, all afternoon. In the bright sun. And she hadn’t even noticed.

What must they think of her?

“Yes,” was all Bellamy replied, his eyes twinkling above his beard and his lips turned up in a gentle smile. “I wondered if you’d realized.”

Clarke shivered hard right then. From cold, or reaction, or a barely suppressed desire to fling herself into his arms, or some strange combination of all of them. She wrapped her arms around herself and held on tight. “Who did the painting?”

“We all did pieces of it. We wanted to. But Monty found the design and Raven blocked it out.” Bellamy frowned a little as he looked at her. “Are you shaking? No. You’re cold! Go get a sweater, woman!”

“Yes, sir!” Clarke smiled, gestured a mock salute, and fled for the ship. For the _Gryphon_ , all the while aware of a grin she couldn’t hide.

~~~~

Clarke gazed across the laughing group gathered around the fire under a star-filled sky, and saw that they were all beautiful.

She wished she had the means to capture the way the leaping flames, yellow and orange and pink and gold, pulled them all close together under the deep purple-black of the densely star-speckled sky. Or the way the full glory of the Milky Way streaked nearly white from horizon to horizon.

Or that she had the skill to use color and shape and light to show the way her friends teased and praised each other. To suggest the way their eyes sparkled and their teeth flashed. The way their hands flew as they talked.

Watercolors. Pastels. Acrylics. Oils. Brushes and canvas. All the media a millennia’s-worth of artists had taken for granted, that Dante Wallace and his band of vampires had hoarded under their mountain. All lost to her now.

It shouldn’t matter, she knew. Team Space was home. Happy, healthy, safe. Bellies full of a thick fish stew served over grains, some kind of fry bread to sop up the remains, and Monty’s homebrew, six years smoother, to finish off the evening.

But there was an ache, all the same. To know that this moment was so fleeting, and imperfect memory was all there would ever be to hold it.

She’d tried to acknowledge the ship’s name, to let them know, one or two at a time, that she’d seen the nose-art and understood. But this made them blush and duck away.

She’d also hoped to have more time with Bellamy, to sit with him at her ease, now that all the secrets were out and shared. But he stayed too busy to settle anywhere for long. Bringing more wood, hauling more water, pausing for a game of tag with the children, helping Echo and Emori carry out the dishes, and then wash them up and put them all away again.

Then by the light of the fire, and the smooth burn of his moonshine, Monty finally started telling the stories he and Bellamy hadn’t told before. His stories led to other stories, and once cracked, the floodgates opened wide and more and more stories came spilling out after that.

Six years of mishaps and pratfalls and dangerous adventures in space. Rebuilding and resurfacing the little shuttle, feeding themselves, keeping the ring in order, and of course, through it all – becoming a family as they cared for a baby and then a toddler and then a little boy, pouring into him all their hopes for a future on a broken Earth.

Listening to their anecdotes and snippets and complex multipart sagas told by many voices correcting and contradicting and calling each other out in laughter and faux outrage – Clarke finally understood all the strange gaps and silences and omissions in the few stories Bellamy and Monty had shared in the Rover on the drive to reunite with the crew of the _Gryphon_.

There’d have been no possible way to talk about their exile in space that didn’t break their promises to Raven. There was no story from the last six years that didn’t end up mentioning her, the brilliant mechanic who had so often held their lives in her hands. And while she worked, someone else had to literally hold Danny. And that would be a whole other chapter right there.

Usually that was the funny one.

Clarke and Madi and Roan listened and laughed and gasped and clapped, each of them as awed as the other at the precarious lives Team Space had lived in the last remnant of the Ark.

The biggest stories of all were Raven’s.

“I started making sketches for the _Gryphon_ when I was pregnant. I didn’t decide I was going to have this baby, only then to drop to earth in a can and risk burning up on entry. Or smashing into an oily skid mark on the surface. I’d seen the old shuttles, years ago, but never really had much use for them. But now I did. I started dreaming, and planning, and finding materials. When Danny was three months old, I made my pitch.”

“And we all agreed,” Bellamy said. “It wasn’t hard. None of us wanted to drop blind in a can again either. Not if we didn’t have to.”

Bellamy was crouching near Monty at that point. The meal had mostly been cleared away, but he still hadn’t settled down, was still restlessly moving from place to place around the fire.

“I’m so sorry we were so late,” Raven leaned forward and spoke earnestly to Clarke, “I thought four years would be plenty! There were things we didn’t anticipate. That I didn’t anticipate well enough.”

What could Clarke or Roan say to that, anything other than, “The _Gryphon_ is incredible and you are home safe and that is what matters most of all.”

Clarke also learned that, just as she and Roan had done for Madi, Team Space had been doing the same for Danny. Filling him up with stories of the missing and the dead.

At one point early in the evening he went dashing inside the ship – as far as Clarke could tell he hardly ever walked, his only gears appeared to be stop and run, all the bruises and all the admonishments of the adults around him notwithstanding – and came flying back outside with the fluttering pages of a large homemade book in his hands.

It was all Danny’s work. He’d illustrated, in a child’s crude drawings densely colored in a rainbow of crayons, many of the stories they’d told him about his father. Hunting, training, fighting, going to school. Most of the stories had to have come from Echo, Clarke realized, probably entirely or mostly fabricated or based on Azgedan customs and lore. But that hardly mattered and wasn’t the point, and Clarke scolded herself for being cynical over something so meaningful.

Roan flipped through each page, listening attentively as Danny leaned on his shoulder and explained each illustration and pointed out fine details as he spoke. Roan lifted his gaze each time to Raven’s face, an expression of utter wonder in his eyes.

Clarke realized she was watching a man fall in love, again, in real time.

Not that he hadn’t been utterly consumed by desire to be reunited with Raven before tonight, because he had been. He’d been sitting on top of mountains and staring at stars for her for the better part of six years, for God’s sake. Dreaming of seeing her again.

And it was love, no doubt. But it was equal parts guilt and debt as well as want and need. This was something new. Tender and yearning and filled with awe.

Clarke was hardly the only one to notice it. All of Team Space did. It made them lean in all the harder, a raggedy collection of fairy godmothers putting the finishing touches on their creation.

Even Bellamy eventually got with the program. He told Roan stories of watching Raven work on the _Gryphon_ , Danny strapped to her chest in a sling, or later handing her every tool his small hands could lift as she named them, as she taught him the parts of the engine along with his ABCs.

Honoring mothers. Because that’s who Bellamy was. Clarke searched his face in the firelight, as he grinned broadly and gestured with his big hands, rocking an imaginary baby in one arm and hammering at an imaginary ship with the other. To her delight, she found more of the man she remembered. The man she’d described to Madi in her own stories of the missing and the mourned.

She smiled over the pinch that he was still on the other side of the fire. He hadn’t come to sit by her. No third time was the charm. Not yet.

Madi sat next to Clarke and absorbed every word, every gesture, every story. When Danny’s book was passed around, she poured over it with far more curiosity than Clarke had expected, only to sit back once it had moved on to whisper, “Pretty good for a little kid.”

Raven finally exclaimed, “Stop! You’re all making me embarrassed. I was just being a mom. My kid, my responsibility.”

At least half the people around the fire, including Raven and Roan both, had had moms who weren’t very good at the whole ‘mom thing.’ Clarke wanted to object, rush to Raven’s defense, stoutly insist that she’d clearly been so much more than ‘just a mom’ to this happy healthy trusting little boy. But she didn’t know how.

Roan reached out and dropped his hand to Raven’s knee. “You’re the awesome Raven Reyes. Of course you’re an extraordinary mom. Why wouldn’t you be?”

Raven’s answering smirk still looked embarrassed, but she straightened her spine and met his proud gaze. “Damn straight.”

Madi and Danny vanished into the _Gryphon_ , after Raven suggested that Danny show Madi his video games.

The bottle of Monty’s homebrew was emptied and he opened another.

Raven returned from another check on the children, and, nestling herself more firmly into Roan’s side, raised her cup. “To Clarke!”

“Raven, that’s like, your fifth toast to me!” Clarke cried.

“None of us would be here without you. Danny wouldn’t be here. Roan wouldn’t be here. Madi wouldn’t be here,” Raven looked solemnly around the whole circle. “Being all together at last, it’s….” Raven trailed off, swallowing her lack of words with her moonshine.

“Yeah,” Clarke laughed, her gaze darting over group as well, “I'm still amazed, too…” her glance fell on Danny’s book, full of thoroughly colored illustrations of his father’s story, “just taking it all in.”

“You can ask,” Raven waited for Clarke’s attention, then tilted her own head significantly toward Danny’s book, “if you want.”

Clarke met her eyes, and laughed. Resigned and embarrassed and curious as shit. “Okay. Fine. What happened to your implant? How in the hell did you end up pregnant?”

“Other than the obvious?” Raven asked, rocking into Roan at her side to a chorus of snickers.

Clarke batted her hand at the peanut gallery. “Yes.”

“Near as I can figure? When you temporarily kill yourself and then restart your heart and your brain with a serious electric jolt – you fry your birth control.”

“Huh.” Clarke thought through what she dimly remembered of how their old birth control implants worked, plus the details of Raven’s successful attempt to flush out the remains ALIE and, basically, reboot her own brain. “I never even thought of that… but. Huh. Yeah.”

“Obviously neither did I, or, you know. Precautions and shit.”

“When did you figure it out?”

“Not for months. And because I didn’t think it was possible, I didn’t figure it out.” Raven pointed across the fire with a broad smirk on her face.

Echo, sitting comfortably between Harper and Emori, tossed back her hair and laughed. “I did.”

“It was a bad time,” Raven explained. “We were all exhausted and cranky and the nutrient baths for the algae still weren’t right and were giving us all cramps and the runs. On top of that I was barfing. Every afternoon around the same time. I was giving Monty hell for that one night at supper – still sorry about that!” she said with a quick smile at Monty, which he brushed off with a fond smile of his own, “and that’s when Echo took a really good look at me.”

“I told her she was pregnant,” Echo said.

“I told her there was no fucking way.”

“And I reminded you that there was in fact plenty of _fucking_ way.” Murphy waggled his finger at Raven from across the circle. “Ice King here hauled you out of that tank himself. Roan and Clarke didn’t get the call to Polis to deal with the bunker discovery for three more days after your whole ‘reboot your brain’ episode. More than enough time. And then some. Which you made full use of.”

Raven and Roan exchanged a sly glance, clearly full of their own memories of how exactly they’d passed that time. Celebrating Raven’s success in eliminating the last of ALIE’s chip from inside her brain stem. Celebrating not dying.

Clarke certainly remembered that no one had seen much of either of them. Not outside mealtimes or when Raven was working in the lab with her mom and Jackson, running test after test on slides of blood drawn from Roan and Clarke.

“So John looked up how to do the pregnancy test.” The proud grin Emori bestowed on her partner was utterly charming. Six years had done nothing to dim their bond. Harper and Monty hadn’t lasted much past the first year as a romantic pair, Clarke had learned. But John and Emori were still going strong. “And then he ran it. Four times.”

“Raven called me a liar. All four times.” The look Murphy flashed at Raven also held nothing but fondness, however dry his tone.

Raven ignored him all the same. “So I ran it myself. They were all right. Totally pregnant.” Then she smiled brilliantly. “And so, Danny.”

But she immediately grew serious again. “There is something else, though,” she said, turning back to Clarke. “Something I need to tell both of you.”

Clarke exchanged a mildly alarmed look with Roan.

“Two related something elses.” Raven shot them both an apologetic look. “Not that anyone doubted that Roan is Danny’s father, because there were no other candidates. However, it was really, really clear as soon I was far enough along that we could do high resolution ultrasounds.”

Roan frowned uncertainly. Clarke felt a vague premonition but she didn’t know for what.

“Danny is a natblida. A natural-born nightblood.”

“Oh. Wow.” That was so not what Clarke had expected. Not that she’d had any expectations. But. Wow. That was – she looked at Roan.

“A natblida? Danny?” He simply repeated the news. Too stunned by it to respond.

“Yeah.” Raven laughed, still sounding faintly shocked all these years later. “That serum worked flipping fast!”

“That’s good. Right?” The lines between Roan’s brows deepened as he worked it out. “The higher radiation levels won’t hurt him, the radiation in the fish we ate, or in the soil, or the water?”

“Yes. He’s fine. Trust me. I’ve been checking him regularly.” Raven took a deep breath. “There’s more, though. Once we knew, I realized we would have something even better than bone marrow. I would have both cord cells and placental cells to work from. As well as a blood sample. And I had zero-g conditions.”

This Clarke understood instantly. “Oh, my God. Raven.”

“Yeah.” Raven was nodding, at once very proud and clearly a little uncertain of Clarke’s reaction. “Monty and I made more serum. Using your mom’s notes and improvements on Becca’s formula.”

“So…You…All of you?”

“Yes.” Raven held out her hands, taking in all of Team Space. “We’re all nightbloods now.”

Clarke looked around the fire, and it all clicked. Why they all looked so damn fine. So healed. So healthy and strong. Their hair so thick and lustrous. Eyes clear, shoulders square, backs straight. It hadn’t been due to time and quiet alone. They were all nightbloods now, too.

“This is fantastic,” Clarke grinned at them all, then met Raven’s eyes and added an utterly heartfelt, “You are a true genius, Raven. Once in a generation.”

“Pretty sure you mean once in a century.” Raven struck a pose and preened, but then she broke and laughed warmly, encompassing all her friends from Team Space in a proud smile and open hands. “I didn't do it alone. Monty and Harper and Murphy all helped with the lab work and Emori did tons of the maths.”

“All of you are fantastic,” Clarke said. And they were; individual works of art each and every one. The nightblood had restored them, and made them strong. She should feel nothing but gladdened, heart and soul, for her friends.

But the bitter worm hidden in her chest grew a little bigger, and a little heavier. Her resentments were growing, not going away. She didn’t understand how or why, but she felt them all the same.

So then in turn did her guilt grow, for feeling anything but unalloyed pleasure at her friends’ happy return to the ground.

At their health and well-being. At their beautiful ship, so carefully and skillfully crafted. At their clear abilities to fend for themselves on the Earth, entirely without her help and support.

At Roan and Raven’s joyful reunion, and for their adorable son.

Then, of course, there was Bellamy, on whose return she’d banked so much. Too much. Too much for any one person to bear.

She’d had no right to expect him to fulfill dreams he’d never shared with her in the first place, and she was just going to have to choke that bitter truth down on her own, too.

Even Monty’s homebrew wasn’t enough for that, but she emptied her cup in a swallow anyway, and accepted a refill from Murphy. It didn’t ease her resentments, but it might help her to hide them.


	7. Chapter 7

“Nomi. Nomi.”

Madi’s rough whisper dragged Clarke from deep sleep to instant if somewhat bleary wakefulness.

It had been a long time since she’d indulged in any alcohol. Neither she nor Roan had the patience to make it for themselves.

“What?” She rubbed at her eyes, blinking at the unfamiliar glow cast by the small nightlight in the corner of the berth she and Madi were sharing with Danny.

“Danny’s not here.”

Clarke sat up. A little too fast.

“I woke up to go to the head.” Madi was enjoying very much using all the new vocabulary she’d learned from Harper’s tour. Clarke held back her smile.

“When I came back into our berth,” Madi gestured to the other very empty bottom bunk, “I saw he was gone.”

“Okay.” Clarke nodded several times. “He probably did the same.” Her voice was very raspy at first and she paused to clear her throat. “Or maybe went looking for his mom. I’ll go check both places. I also know Bellamy closed the outer hatch when we all came in last night and I doubt Danny can open it.”

After hearing those words out loud, Clarke reconsidered. She wouldn’t want to make a single wager on what sort of evil mechanical genius any child of Raven Reyes might possess. Even at five years old. “Go on back to bed. It’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“If it’s more than that, you’ll know!” Clarke swung her legs out and stood up, then looked around for her boots.

A few minutes later she was tapping on the door across the narrow hall. “Raven?” she called softly.

Surprisingly quickly the door slid open, and Raven slipped out, clutching an old and faded oversize floral wrapper around herself. She caught the door with her hand before it could close all the way.

“Looking for Danny?” she mouthed more than whispered, and then gestured with her head, inviting Clarke to peek inside.

Clarke nodded, and peered in.

In the pale glow of another small night lamp, she saw that Roan had taken the inside spot on the single large bed that filled most of the small quarters. He was lying on his back, propped on pillows, one arm under his head and one bare knee poking out of the tumbled blankets to rest against the inside wall. Sprawled across Roan’s naked chest, also on his back but spread out like a very large starfish, was his pajama-clad snoring son.

Roan raised his fingers and waved at Clarke. She returned the wave and pulled back so Raven could let the door slide closed.

“He’s marking his territory,” Raven murmured, somewhat louder than before.

“Danny, or Roan?” Clarke asked drily.

“Good one. Both of them.”

Clarke and Raven snickered quietly, shoulders shaking as they kept their amusement as muffled as they could.

Raven cocked her head in invitation, raising the canteen Clarke hadn’t noticed earlier and shaking it. “I was going to go get some more water. Want some?”

Clarke fell into step beside her.

Raven started talking, her voice low and soothing. “Getting Danny to stop sleeping with me every night was hell. And that’s how he sleeps. Taking up the whole bed like that AND touching.” Raven shuddered. “I finally succeeded, so that’s why he’s got his own berth on the _Gryphon_. Not risking a relapse. But with Roan, he obviously couldn’t stay away.”

“It must be really exciting for him. Getting his dad after waiting so long. After all the work you guys did to make sure he was primed?”

Raven grimaced. “Maybe overkill, yeah? How can the real thing not be disappointing?”

“No.” Clarke shook her head. “If Danny were ten? Maybe. Or fifteen? Definitely. But he’s five. There’s no such thing. It’s going to be serious hero worship. It was that way with Madi and she was almost eight when we met up with Roan. I’d only had about a year of telling her stories. She still followed him everywhere. And then she was really mad at ME, not him, when he left.”

Raven regarded Clarke quietly for a moment. “There’s a lot of story there.”

She left it a simple observation, not a question. For which Clarke was grateful.

“Yeah.”

“Just because I’m really glad to see him, or because he’s Danny’s father, doesn't mean I don’t also remember that he’s fully capable of being an asshole.” Raven’s tone was wry but her expression was full of sympathy.

Clarke grimaced. “Aren’t we all.”

“Hey.” Raven reached out to grip Clarke’s arm. “You’re the one who stayed behind to open the door that saved our lives. Without that, none of this would be.”

Alternating between grave thanks and awkward dismissals suddenly left Clarke feeling exhausted. Struggling to keep her voice to an impassioned whisper, she exclaimed, “I really tried to get back in time! I didn’t want to stay behind. Glorious sacrifice wasn’t my plan. When I realized what I had to do, it sucked so damn hard!”

She paused to gulp in a shuddering breath. “But I’d do it again all the same. It was the best choice to save the most people. And then I found Madi, and then we found Roan, and...” she ran out of steam and cut herself short. “Well, we made it. Leaning on each other. Just like you all did on Go-Sci. You’ve thanked me all you ever need to do just by getting home again. No more. Please.”

After a searching glance Raven nodded cautiously. “I get that. Six years of stored-up guilt and gratitude erupting all over you all at once is probably a little…messy.”

That surprised a quiet laugh out of Clarke. “A little.”

Raven raised her brow.

“Okay. Yeah. A lot.”

Raven’s grin shifted into a rueful expression. “I hear you. No promises. But I will try. And get the word out to the others.” A small worried frown appeared between Raven’s eyes. “You’re okay with the whole nightblood thing, though, right?” Then she shook her head and backed off, waving her hand. “I mean, never mind. That was weird. That’s a weird question…”

“Raven! Of course I’m okay with it!” Clarke protested, telling herself the bitter tang in the back of her throat was the aftereffects of Monty’s brew, nothing more. Telling herself that there was no way Raven could know about that nasty bitter worm of resentment burrowing in her chest. “Look at yourselves! It’s more than okay. It’s amazing science. Brilliant. You’re brilliant.”

“Monty and Emori, too. It really wasn’t just me.”

“You were all brilliant together. Background radiation levels in general are still significantly higher that they were before, yeah?”

Raven nodded.

“And radiation is in the water and the fish and the plants and the soil, and now you don’t have to worry, none of us have to worry…”

“True. In fact. If you wanted, I could do a quick blood test. See if Madi, or even you or Roan needed boosters?”

Clarke wrinkled her forehead. “Boosters?”

“Yeah. Your mom’s mods worked. We can take amazing loads now. Like – deep space exploration is in our future, Clarke! No more cryo tanks to get anywhere if we don’t want to. Edge of the solar system. Or beyond it.” Raven’s eyes were actually sparkling with anticipation, gazing into a future beyond the stars. She blinked and refocused on the present. “But here on Earth, too. Poor burned baby. Anyway. I could check. If you liked.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll definitely…” Clarke started nodding vigorously, telling herself that she couldn’t possibly be offended by the idea of having only second-best nightblood, because nothing on this earth could be more ridiculous than that. “That seems sensible. Smart.”

Raven turned from refilling her canteen. “You know…when I made them swear to let me be the one to tell Roan about Danny, I never imagined it would be three weeks after they ran into each other. I was thinking it would be like, a day or two to keep the news. At most. Monty said it was like living in an acid bath.” Raven trailed off and made a face.

“Yeah.” It was Clarke’s turn to grimace. “It was pretty bad. Roan was working himself into fits of worried rage about you, knew they were keeping secrets from him. Bellamy just pretended it wasn’t happening, or wasn’t a big deal anyway if it was. Which made it impossible to deal with.”

“That is one of his favorite strategies for dealing with painful things,” Raven remarked as they left the galley. “Just saying.” The she turned her head, her expression full of concern. “Clarke…”

“Yes?”

“I…” Raven trailed off, her expression uncertain. After an uncomfortable pause, she just said, “Don’t wait too long to decide what you want from him, okay? He’s been through a lot. We all have.”

On that warning note, Raven reached out and wrapped her free arm around Clarke in another quick, hard hug. Then she turned and strode quickly and silently away on her bare feet, back to her berth and to her family. Her soft robe fluttered around her ankles as she moved, and she brushed her fingers along the wall for balance. There was only a barely visible hitch in her stride as she favored her bad hip on her un-braced knee.

Clarke followed her more slowly through the tiny open crew lounge, dark and silent but for another of the ubiquitous small night lamps in the corner. She paused as she came opposite Bellamy’s door. Decide what she wanted from him? Of course she knew what she wanted from him!

Didn’t she?

She wanted her romantic reunion with him! She wanted a romantic future with him. Of course she did. That’s what she’d been dreaming about for six freaking years. She wanted it so much, so badly, she could even now imagine the ghost weight of his arms around her.

In fact, she wanted it so much and so clearly, she should just knock. Right now. And tell him so. That would be the most sensible and efficient and honest thing to do!

She stood there, recalling those few fleeting moments, now so long ago, when she’d been able to watch Bellamy sleeping. Visualizing his berth, twin to Raven’s. Imagining what he would look like now, sprawled alone in his bed. Wondered if maybe waking him up was possibly a little intrusive. Pushy. Over bold.

And so she paused a little while longer, her fingers metaphorically held in the air as she puzzled out whether she was going to tap and rouse him – or not. The metal and glass fibers of the hull creaked in the night as they cooled, and her own skin cooled with the air around her.

At last she turned and crept silently back to her own bed.

True confessions could be just as easily delivered in the bright sunlight as the middle of the night, she assured herself. Better in fact. They would be more easily believed. Now he might dismiss it as the last fog of Monty’s brew, put her off on the grounds that she didn’t mean what she said and would regret it later.

Clarke was just settling under her blankets when the door slid open and Roan appeared, his broad shoulders straining the fabric of Raven’s belted floral wrapper, which didn’t really close until nearly his waist. By glow of the nightlight, Clarke could see he held Danny, soundly sleeping still, balanced in his arms. After gently depositing Danny into his bunk, Roan drew up the covers and tucked him in. Then he turned to Clarke, lifted his finger to his lips, winked broadly, and vanished.

Clarke regarded Danny’s sleeping form, lovingly restored to his blankets by his father, until she couldn’t look at him any longer. And then she rolled over and faced the wall between her bunk and the engine compartment.

Her head felt like it was spinning, and not from Monty’s brew.

Danny Reyes was an impossibility. Clarke knew this as surely as she knew her own name. He shouldn’t exist. He was an accident in every sense of the word. Roan should never have been made a nightblood. He shouldn’t have been having an affair with Raven. Raven should never have conceived a child, much less chosen to bring him into such a precarious circumstance as their situation on the ring. And Danny should have never been born a natblida, or thrived so easily and well.

But here Danny Reyes was. Softly snoring. In his vigorous little body he bound together two people, Raven and Roan, and two peoples, Azgeda and Skaikru. In his making, he’d been the path to solving the nightblood riddle. And now more nightblood could be made from nothing more exotic than bone marrow and a centrifuge, right here on earth. They had nine adult donors already. Growth could be exponential.

As it should be. As Clarke and Roan had already discovered, as Team Space had already discovered, nightblood protected against radiation by ramping up the body’s natural regeneration and healing mechanisms. Against anything. Radiation. Injury. Disease. Cancer. Smallpox. Hemorrhagic fevers. Pneumonia. The common cold. Exhaustion. Idiotically romantic attempts at self-scarification.

It even helped with old injures. Old scars. Raven’s dead nerves were dead. But her injured ones had healed. Emori’s bones were still her twisted bones. But her skin over those bones was now healthy and strong. And Clarke hadn’t asked, but she had her suspicions about Harper’s heart defect as well.

Those with nightblood were also stronger. Faster. Their reaction times quicker. Their hearing was better. So was their vision.

Clarke had asked Raven, obliquely, about downsides. About side effects. Especially on the mind. All her fears and worries about perceptions, about blurring boundaries between fantasy and reality, behind her words.

To Clarke’s surprise, Raven had answered quickly. But not about the mind. About the body itself.

“Yes. We’re a little worried about metabolic burnout. Echo says legend tells that Becca herself didn’t live very long. And few subsequent commanders have either. Though they usually died violently, rather than by natural lifespan. Echo, Bellamy and Roan are all already older than the last half-dozen commanders ever lived to be. But they were born natblidas, more than twenty years into their hyper-regeneration. So we really don’t know. And we don’t even know what we don’t know. But right now, they’re all healthier than they’ve ever been.”

~~~~

Clarke passed a box of bullets down into Roan’s outstretched hands. She was perched on top of the Rover and they were unloading the last of her weapons cache.

“Were you surprised? By Danny?” she asked, striving for nonchalance that she didn’t feel. It had taken her most of the unloading to get the question out.

“That he exists? Yes. Completely. I never expected…” Roan was looking up at her, a sublime grin of inexpressible happiness filling in for all the words he wasn’t saying.

Clarke grinned back at him because his elation was catching, but what she said was, “No. I mean, not that he exists. But that he, that you…” she stumbled to wordlessness herself.

Roan paused, the box in his hands, his head cocked as he examined her face. “That he’s my son?”

Clarke nodded.

“No. I was almost certain, as soon as I saw him.”

“Really?” Clarke gaped down at Roan. “How?”

“This will sound strange, I’m sure,” he lifted his shoulder in a faintly embarrassed shrug, “but he looks like half the kids in Azgeda. Like …” he trailed off, shadows passing over his face. He turned away to add the box to the stack. “Like my cousins and their kids did. My nieces and my nephews. And of course I realized immediately he had to be Raven’s son. So…”

He grinned over his shoulder at her, pointing to himself. Whatever memories had surfaced ruthlessly pushed down again.

“What?” Clarke nearly squeaked her surprise. “How did you guess so fast he was Raven’s?”

He squinted at her, indicting that he felt she was being unusually dense. “Raven was the only one they were being squirrelly about.”

Clarke blinked. That thought had not crossed her mind yesterday.

“Then she walked out and smiled at me. So. I knew.”

Now his grin was just flat-out cocky. Clarke rolled her eyes at him.

“Whose kid did you think…?” he trailed off.

Clarke didn’t have to say anything. She knew her face gave her away.

“Get down from there.” He gestured impatiently.

While she was swinging down he was wrenching open the back doors to take a seat, his legs dangling over the fender. He pointed at the empty space to his left, and she sat down beside him, trying not to feel like she was about to be chided. Knowing full well she was about to be chided.

“Clarke.”

It was so much worse than a chiding. His quiet voice was kind. Understanding. Gentle.

“He’s been waiting for you as long as you’ve been waiting for him. Possibly longer. Bellamy did not crawl into bed with Raven, or anyone else, and get a child on them the minute he left Earth.”

“I know. I know! It … I talked to him every day. Only now it’s really clear that I was talking to an image in my heart, and not HIM. He’s a near stranger again.”

“He’s the same man he always was. And his devotion to you is unchanged.”

“But when I wasn’t around before, he fell in love with someone else in a matter of weeks.” She tried, and failed, not to sound sulky.

“Who?!”

“Gina!” Clarke couldn’t believe Roan had forgotten this. The _hours_ she’d spent bending his ear about this. Days, even. Had Bellamy ever really loved her, Clarke? As more than a dear friend? Was she only imagining romantic feelings in all the gestures? The looks, the touches, the almost confessions? Making more of each than was meant? Building too much on foundations that couldn’t hold…? When what he’d felt for Gina Martin had been real all along?

“Gina Martin?” she repeated. “The only girlfriend he’s ever actually had?”

Roan rolled his eyes. “Pfft. Gina Martin.”

“You’re the one who told me about Gina in the first place!” This was true. Echo had learned of Gina’s death in Mount Weather, and she’d told Roan, who’d told Clarke during long summer nights in the Green when it was too hot to sleep and they’d talked about all the things they missed, and some of the things they hoped for.

“No. ALIE told you about Gina. I just confirmed it.”

“Not really! Sort of.” This was also true and Clarke had the order of things all mixed up in her head now.

“Whatever. Doesn't matter.” Roan grandly dismissed the entire problem with a wave of his hand. “Gina was a distraction because you’d run off to the woods. If you’d stayed in Arkadia as you should have, then there would have been no affair with Gina.”

“Oh, right. Like you’d know! Because you and Bellamy had some sort of heart-to-heart on the trail? Lost loves of my life that I regret?” Clarke snorted her disbelief. “That I’d like to have heard!”

Roan scowled incredulously. “No. We did no such thing, and never will. But he made it plain he didn’t think much of the fact that I wasn’t with you and Madi. There were a lot of unsubtle remarks about my unsteadiness. My failure to carry out my responsibilities in protecting you from threats real and imagined.”

“There were no threats until five days ago!”

“Yes.”

“And I’m completely capable of taking care of myself! And Madi! And I prefer it that way!”

Roan was leaning away from her with his hands raised in the classic position of surrender. “Yes! I know! That’s exactly what I told him!”

Clarke realized she’d been waving her finger at him and started to laugh, letting her face fall into her palms. “I’m a mess.”

Roan put a reassuring hand to the back of her neck and shook her gently. “Use your words, Clarke. Fuck knows you have enough of them.”

“Like that’s what you did.” Clarke sent him a withering side-eye from between her fingers.

“Yes. Unlike you,” he sat up and side-eyed her right back, “I had a plan.”

“Oh, you did?”

“I did.” He nodded solemnly. “I spent six years crafting it. Honing it. Perfect alignment between my strategic goals and my tactical objectives.”

“You had a _battle plan_?” Clarke glowered at him. “You are such a jerk.”

He ignored her commentary. “It had three steps.” He held up a finger. “One, make sure she still felt the same way about me.” Then a second finger. “Two. Kiss her.” And a third. “Three. Tell her I love her.”

“Admirably simple,” Clarke said drily.

“Also effective,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” His soft smile, and the way he was so obviously seeing Raven in his mind’s eye, made Clarke’s toes curl, and not even for herself. “It’s working out very well.” He refocused on Clarke, his gaze sharp and clean. “You should consider something similar. A second chance on this Earth is rare. Don’t lose it by hesitating too long.”

Before she could dream up any way to reject this obviously sound advice, Bellamy himself disturbed them by calling her name.

“Clarke! Clarke?” Bellamy appeared around the back of the Rover, his expression closing over as soon as he saw her with Roan. “Oh. There you are.”

Clarke was already scrambling out of the Rover as quickly as she could, brushing her hands briskly on her pants as she got to her feet. “Yes, we’re here. Everything is unloaded and ready to move.”

She smiled brightly, but Bellamy was already turning away. She glanced over at Roan who was making dramatic shooing motions at her, urging her to follow Bellamy.

Clarke wanted to follow Bellamy. How she wanted to follow him! But what would she say? How would she begin? S _o, how about we get into the cargo hold, just the two of us, if you know what I mean?_

God was she bad at this. Fortunately, or not, before she could humiliate herself in public she caught sight of Monty and Murphy headed over to help them move the weapons.

Bellamy had stopped to heft a box to his shoulder, “Come on then,” he called out to the assembling group. “Let’s get this done.”

Once they’d reached the main hatch of the _Gryphon_ , Bellamy paused just before they headed up the ramp to explain, “I thought we’d show you how to get into the cargo hold.”

It was every bit as difficult as Harper and Bellamy had hinted.

Using a pair of hooks, cleverly stowed in a nearby wall compartment, they hefted out four of the surprisingly large and heavy floor panels, two from the narrow hall and two just inside the open crew area. Once the panels were displaced, the berths were inaccessible. The hold itself was dish shaped, barely six feet deep at the lowest point, and would require working on hands and knees at the outer edges to use its full capacity.

Clarke stared into this open pit with a deep scowl. “I don’t like this. What if we need quick access to the weapons?”

“For what purpose?” Bellamy asked, his glance disapproving and his tone heavy with suspicion.

“I don’t know!” she replied, feeling stung and attacked. “Anything!”

“People,” he said, his frown mirroring hers. “You mean people. From the _Eligius_. Or Octavia’s Wonkru.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“The world is pretty fucking empty, otherwise, Clarke. What the hell else could you be talking about?” His swung down into the hold, landing with a solid thud.

She flailed for a better answer and seized on, “Hunting!”

“Hunting what?!” Bellamy challenged, glaring up at her.

“Bears. And alligators,” Roan said promptly. “I started carrying a gun several years ago. Their range is spreading because the world is warmer now. I haven’t seen any this far north yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“What?!” Raven appeared around the edge of the hatch, her eyes wide and startled. “There could be alligators in the lake and you didn’t say anything?”

“There are NOT alligators in this lake yet, or I would have said something,” Roan replied. “And if there were any nearby they would have raided your traps and nets by now.”

“Earth,” Raven huffed in exasperation. “So glad to be home.” From just inside the hatch she grabbed a small open crate full of electronics, then stomped back down the ramp, her ponytail swinging with every step.

“Okay. Fine.” Bellamy said, glowering at the group gathered around the open hold. “We keep a few hunting rifles and a few handguns locked up above for predator animals. But all the rest of this stuff,” he gestured expansively, “the rocket launcher, the grenades, the heavy guns, all of that goes in the hold.”

“But what if we did need them? And in a hurry. Because of the _Eligius_?” Clarke asked him, dropping the pretense that it wasn’t humans who concerned her most. “You remember that crewman, don’t you? He wasn’t a friend, and he wasn’t sent to make friends. We need to be ready to defend ourselves at the very least. And we can’t do it if the heavy gear is impossible to get to in a hurry.”

“Exactly. If we have the weapons where they aren’t easy to get to, we can’t accidentally start a war this time. This time, if we start shooting, we do it only because we’ve fully thought it through.”

“That makes us sitting ducks!”

“We’re in a plane!” Bellamy reminded her, his tone somewhere between condescending and patronizing. He reached for the largest of the guns. “We can run whenever we feel like it!”

“And how do you know they don’t have bigger guns mounted on that ship of theirs? Can’t shoot us down?” she asked, trying not to let her irritation at his presumption show.

“It's a mining vessel.” Bellamy grunted, stepping back to catch the weight as Murphy slid the heavy gun into his arms. “Not a warship.”

“It’s a prison ship! Full of criminals!” Clarke reminded him. Reminded all of them. “People so expendable and dangerous they got shipped off to the edges of the solar system. And clearly are still murderers and thieves! Violent brutal convicts who’ve already stolen my home from me!”

Bellamy slid the gun onto a shelf in the deep recess of the hold. Once he’d backed out he turned to look at Clarke. His expression was both frustrated and disappointed. “Why are you so determined to find enemies in the last humans left in the universe?”

“When did you get fucking naïve?” she shot back. “There is not one encounter we have EVER had with other people that did not turn out to be a complete disaster, Bellamy! Not a goddamn one! Every single time we lost people! Five, ten, forty. Hundreds. We don't have a single person left to lose! Not one person I’m prepared to gamble with! Not me, not Madi, not Roan! Not you or Raven or Danny, or any of the rest of you!”

Clarke flung out her arms and took in the whole of the crew of the _Gryphon_. “You are all too precious to me and I don't care who or how many I have to kill, I am not losing any of you. Never again. I will die with the last generation of humanity, and surrounded only by those I love rather than help my enemies survive into the next generation or the one after that. Especially not a bunch of fucking convicts. Murderers and thieves already exiled from Earth once before! If you can’t deal with that, then…”

Clarke realized she was far too close to shouting. And everyone was staring at her in varying degrees of alarm. Or, in Bellamy’s case, shocked dismay.

“We have no idea who is on that ship, Clarke.” Bellamy’s hands were on his hips and his voice sank deeper, into his most compelling register as he fought to persuade her. Overawe her. Shut her down, she feared. “It could be the convicts sent out in cyro sleep," he continued. " Or, it could be their descendants four generations later. Either way I refuse to condemn them simply for having survived so far, or for being suspicious now that they’ve landed on a ruined planet. I’m not going to let a war start just because we didn’t know any better. Not this time.”

“You refuse?” Clarke gaped. She could hardly believe her ears.

Bellamy tilted his chin. “Yes. I refuse.” Then, with a visible effort, he softened his stance, just a little. Pulled back. Just a little. “Clarke. Let’s not start something we don’t understand and can’t see a way to finish. Locking up the heavy weapons forces us to take a time out. Pause to make sure we have all the data before we strike first.”

Clarke swallowed hard. Unclenched her fists. Remembered, again, her promises to herself about working with, not against her friends. She thought this was a horrible, terrible, no good mistake. But she couldn’t propose a single alternative.

“Fine.” She nodded jerkily, gritting out between clenched teeth, “Do what you think best.”

Bellamy’s lips tightened into a flat line. He’d clearly heard only a grudging concession, not full agreement there. But that was all she could give right now. She was convinced this was a error they would live to regret if she couldn't correct it, but they were hundreds of miles from the Green and there was no reason to think they’d been followed. Further discussion could be had later.

“You sure?” Roan asked, catching her eye.

At her tight nod, he swung down beside Bellamy, and gestured for Monty and Murphy to start passing down boxes of ammunition.

In the end they kept back Clarke’s and Roan’s hunting rifles and handguns, just as Bellamy had agreed, along with four more rifles. And, Clarke noted but bit her lip rather than say a fucking word because she’d already said too many, Bellamy’s gun. The rest went into the hold. The weapons they saved out went into a currently empty storage locker in the crew area. One with locks, to hold against the prying curiosity of what Murphy assured them was indeed the evil genius of a Reyes spawn.

Bellamy and Roan had just finished closing up the floor when Madi arrived, her cheeks pink and her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Nomi?” she asked, “Nomi? Can I join Echo and Harper and Emori for their morning weapons training?”

Echo followed Madi in. “I told her she had to ask,” she told Clarke, the faintest whiff of defensiveness in her tone.

“It would be good for you to train with a woman warrior,” Roan said to Madi, but also watching Clarke. “Echo can teach you from her own experience, not just theory the way I must. Women fight differently than men, using their size, center of gravity, different muscle mass across the shoulder to their own advantage.”

“Yes.” Echo folded her arms and flicked a dismissive glance at Roan. “A woman warrior requires precision and accuracy, control and finesse. And a strategy to victory from the moment you lift your blade. You can’t just rely on brute strength to bash people aside.”

“For example,” Roan said, tipping his head to Echo.

“I can teach you that,” Echo said to Madi. Who stood up straighter and beamed. Then remembering, Echo turned to Clarke. “I can teach her that.”

“She can.” Roan said, also to Clarke this time.

“Even well enough to beat a man like him,” Echo said, implying Roan without otherwise acknowledging him.

Clarke knew that Roan had sought Echo out, made his apologizes, and lifted, for what it was worth, a banishment from a kingdom and a people that were gone. Now Echo just seemed quietly furious with him, and to be relishing the idea of handing him his ass. Clarke couldn’t blame her.

“Well…” Roan demurred.

Madi was looking back and forth between them, clearly utterly delighted by this interplay. And obviously fascinated by the idea of a grounder woman warrior who was completely underwhelmed by Roan’s fighting prowess.

Clarke wanted to forbid this entirely. She’d learned much from Roan about grounder life, enough to know it wasn’t all swordplay and idiocy. But swordplay and idiocy had loomed too fucking large and she wanted none of it for Madi. But she could think of no way to turn her down and not look like an utter bitch.

Or look like a raging hypocrite after her performance about her own weapons.

Into the pause, Echo had turned to Roan to inquire, deep skepticism dripping from her tone, “Have you been keeping up with your training?”

“As best I could alone.”

“Then yes.” Echo turned back to Clarke and Madi. “I can beat him now, and I can teach you to do the same someday.”

Looking at Madi’s hopeful face, Clarke forced a tight smile and gave in. “Of course. You should definitely start training with Echo. Who knows what the future holds? Good to be ready.”

When they finally exited the ship, Clarke’s skin felt too tight and too small. She knew in her bones that the threats from the _Eligius_ were far greater than Bellamy wanted to acknowledge, knew they had to be ready to defend themselves at a moments notice. Just as she knew in her heart that Madi training to fight with Echo was just another piece of the same larger puzzle. She couldn’t have one without the other, and neither could Bellamy.

In a world that had respected and had responded only to strength, six years ago their caution had been mistaken for weakness. It had cost them so much. More than they’d had to give. She refused to make that mistake again. She had to find a way to make him understand.

She wanted to itch and shiver and shake and stomp off all her frustration and impatience, but knew she was being watched by everyone and couldn’t. Which just made it worse.

Danny’s piping little voice provided a welcome distraction. “Hey! Hi!”

Danny was waving at Roan, who’d followed Clarke out of the ship. Danny was bouncing around in excitement as his mother and Monty finished setting up a folding table and chairs and an assortment of electronic equipment under the shade of the lakeside wing.

“We’re ready!” Danny called. “We’re all ready!”

“What’s this?” Clarke asked when they reached them.

“First stages of pilot training,” Raven answered, though her broad smile was directed squarely over Clarke’s shoulder at Roan alone.

“Is this something you want to do?” Clarke stared at him in surprise. “Learn to pilot the ship?”

“Yes,” he replied. “There are a lot of places the Rover can’t really go, and that you can’t easily walk to either – but we could fly over. I want to cross the Mississippi, without having to walk all the way to Canada. I’d like to know what happened to California, without having to cross another set of mountain ranges on foot. Mexico and South America, too, after that. Maybe even Europe, or Asia.”

Roan was answering Clarke’s question, but it was perfectly clear that he was really talking to Raven. His voice and his eyes full of offers. Promises. Wooing her with a whole world to see.

“You want to learn, too?” Raven asked Clarke, blinking back into herself after a long moment of grinning helplessly at Roan. She looked at Clarke. “It’ll only take me a sec to get another headset?”

“No, no!” Clarke waved her hand in somewhat overeager denial. No matter how much fun it might be to pilot the _Gryphon_ , third wheel was no job for her.

Raven flashed Clarke another brilliant smile and a thumb’s up, pulled on her own headset and sat down next to Roan, reaching over to adjust his to fit properly.

As Clarke backed away, Danny clambered into Roan’s lap, settling in between his parents to play a math game on a third tablet. Clarke smiled as she recognized the game from her own childhood.

Clarke looked around for Monty, to see if he needed her help with anything, but he had disappeared. She felt awkward just standing around by herself in the sun. For the first time in a very long time, she had nothing she had to do.

She decided to look for Bellamy.

Maybe she could find a way to resolve their earlier disagreement, or at least maybe they could agree to disagree more civilly in the future. In public, at any rate. Hold off their disagreement for private. Like they used to do.

The clatter of training swords drew her around the corner of the _Gryphon_ and she discovered Echo’s training ground. The three women and Madi had stripped down to their lightest layers and were already paired off and moving through the steps of a basic drill, while Echo called the count.

Madi’s expression was one of fiercely joyful concentration, and then just fierce joy as she sought and received Echo’s nod of approval at the end of the set. When Madi glanced around as she shook out her shoulders, she caught sight of Clarke watching and waved cheerfully.

Clarke waved back, but Echo was calling the next drill. Madi was already refocused on her new teacher, and missed it.

Shoving her empty hands into her jacket pockets, Clarke kept going around the far side of the _Gryphon_. As she came around the starboard landing gear, the sound of men’s voices raised in anger slowed her steps.

“I think you’re full of shit, Bellamy.” John Murphy’s voice carried clearly.

Bellamy’s reply was too muffled for Clarke to make out. She froze, telling herself she should leave, but then she decided knowledge was better than ignorance. She crept a half step closer and leaned against the landing gear, just enough so that she could more easily hear Bellamy’s deep rumble.

“I may not like Clarke’s attitude,” Murphy was snarling, “who the fuck is she to get all worried about who is a murderer? But I got no problem with choosing mine over theirs. And when it comes right down to it, neither do you. Pretending otherwise is a bunch of bull.”

“Clarke did what she had to do. She saved humanity first. Only after that she saved our lives, saved your life.”

Clarke froze at the sound of Bellamy’s reply. She was much closer to them than she’d thought, she realized, but she was also completely blocked from their vision by the starboard landing gear.

“No, you fucking asshole,” Murphy shot back. “Clarke damn near cost me my life, more than once, because I keep falling outside the circle of people she calls ‘humanity.’ And I have no way of knowing when the fuck I’ll fall outside it again.”

Guilt Clarke hadn’t felt in years reared up to poke her conscience. John Murphy wasn’t a great man, or even a good one. But she’d done him real wrongs, and never yet really made them right.

“Well you don’t fall outside mine,” Bellamy declared firmly. “My team, my crew. You’re my family. Always.”

“Yeah. Maybe. For now! Until you get the fuck over whatever crawled up your nose and crawl back up Clarke’s ass! Then it’s all so long, farewell.”

Clarke’s momentary burn of guilt vanished in her desire to rush out and defend Bellamy’s honor. Crawl up her ass! Nothing could be further from the truth. Bellamy had spent most of the little time they’d had together six years ago arguing with her. Making her a better person as a result, yes! But arguing with her, not just doing what she wanted! Hardly ever. Never. What the fuck was Murphy even talking about?

“That’s enough, Murphy!”

Bellamy defended himself just fine, of course. He didn’t need her help. He never had.

“No, man, it’s not. It’s really not! I will fight and kill for this crew. I got no problem with that. For Danny, too. God knows after what Raven put us through, we all earned our rights to claim him as our own. And if Raven asks me, I’ll add her man to that really short list. But that’s it. _Humanity_ ,” Murphy’s voice dripped contempt, “does not make the cut for me. Humanity has never lifted a goddamn finger for my skinny ass.”

“And Clarke and Madi! And our people in the bunker! We save everyone we can. Even these new people.” Bellamy insisted. “If we can.”

Clarke didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry. Both probably. How could he still be so noble and so stupid all at the same time? How could John Murphy be the one who was making sense?

“No, **_we_** don’t! **_My_** decision is still out on Clarke, and on her grounder kid. And we have no idea who is coming out of that bunker, or if anyone we know or have any reason to trust is still running it. I’m not promising shit until I see who the hell they are.”

“Clarke saved our lives time and time again!”

“Sure. Right after she traded them away. Time and time again. For you. For your sister. Who turned around and burned us all. And if it had just been Emori and me kicked outside? I’m sure the travelers blessing would’ve been very heartfelt. Clarke might even have got a bit choked up.”

“Fuck you, you ungrateful son of a bitch.”

“She followed **you** out into the cold, man. Only you. Not us. And now you won’t even look at her cause you’re so busy respecting her new life choices. Too afraid to tell her what you really want. Someday Clarke’s going to give up waiting for you to man up, Bellamy. Leave you to burn on your own. And then you’ll know what it’s like to be outside her circle.”

Clarke’s ears were burning now. Bellamy was doing what? Respecting her choices? Which choices? What choices? What the hell was Murphy even talking about? And what the fuck did Murphy think Bellamy really wanted?

“You don’t know shit, Murphy!” Bellamy’s voice was rough with anger now. “And you shouldn’t talk about what you don’t know.”

Right. Even Bellamy thought Murphy was full of shit. Of course Murphy was full of shit! What could Murphy possibly know about anything?

“Fuck you, Bellamy,” Murphy said. “I know exactly what I need to know.” His voice faded, and it sounded like he stormed off in another direction.

Clarke felt a bubble of hysterical giggles rising up in chest, and she fought to push them back down lest they reveal her position. She didn’t want anyone know she’d overheard Bellamy’s and Murphy’s argument.

Bellamy’s completely theoretical respect for her choices certainly hadn’t stopped him from taking away all her heavy weapons and locking them up.

The horrible bitter worm in her chest twisted sharply. Swelling, and taking the breath she’d need to move out there and just defend herself already. Defend him. Taking the breath she’d use to lie.

And then Bellamy swung around the landing gear, saw her and stopped abruptly, his eyes wide with surprise and chagrin. After a frozen moment, he tilted his head and forced his lips into an uncomfortable little grin. “Heard that, did you?”

Clarke dropped her hand and straightened up, not wanting to look as weak as she felt. She nodded. “Yes.”

His expression grew more serious. “Are we going to have any problems? About the weapons? Or Murphy?”

This direct question so startled Clarke she actually laughed. Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think I heard everything, but… I think you both said you agree with me?”

Bellamy shrugged a little. “About prioritizing our people first? Yes. Of course I do.”

“You know you’ll always be my people, right? No matter what!” Clarke put every ounce of conviction she had into her voice.

“And you’ll always be mine. Always, Clarke. You and Madi, both.” Bellamy nodded firmly. “Pay no attention to Murphy, he doesn’t know anything about anything. He’s just venting.”

His apprehensive expression made her wish he were standing closer to her, just enough that it would be natural and easy for her to reach out and touch him. Reassure him that she wasn’t at all concerned or embarrassed about anything Murphy had said.

Unfortunately she’d have to take a step to do it and that seemed… awkward. Uninvited. Maybe even unwelcome. Instead, she promised, “I’m not going to leave Murphy out either. Not again. I was wrong every time I did before.”

Bellamy’s shoulders dropped in relief. “Raven calls him the cockroach,” he said, and his smile was more genuine now. “Unkillable.”

Clarke went with it, teasing back, “That’s not very nice.”

“She means it fondly.” Bellamy twisted his lips ruefully. “Well. Mostly fondly.”

“I’ve never really apologized to him, you know. For the drop ship. Or after.”

Bellamy waved this away. “That was all a long time ago.”

“For him?”

“For all of us.”

There was something so very final, and so very sad in the way Bellamy said this.

Clarke didn’t understand how, or why, but it felt like a door was closing somewhere. She wanted to hurl herself into the opening, jam her foot into the frame, set her shoulder to push back with all her might.

If only she could find the damn door.

“It’s never too late, surely, to go back and make things right?” she tried.

“Roan apologizing to Echo didn’t help, did it?” Bellamy countered. “She’s angrier than ever. She was pacing my quarters, swearing in Trigedasleng, before I’d even had breakfast this morning. I’m not sure I see what good reopening up old hurts or unfinished business does for anyone.”

“I…” the image of Echo pacing the tiny strip of open space in Bellamy’s quarters just after dawn was so disconcerting, on so many levels, Clarke stuttered to a halt.

“You can if you want, of course,” he went on, in that same inexorably understanding tone. “But think about if an apology would be for you, or for him.”

Clarke just nodded. It was all she had the power to do.

Bellamy’s expression softened further, as gentle and open as it had been when he’d shown her the name of their ship the evening before. “Sometimes what was in the past is better left there, no matter what regrets we have about it. Better just to keep moving forward. Don’t you think?”

After waiting a beat, a beat in which Clarke could not marshal a single coherent word, Bellamy nodded decisively. Assuming agreement in her silence.

“Good. I’m really glad we talked. Our people first, then humanity.” He reached out and firmly clasped her upper arm, “It’s so good to have you back.”

Then he moved past her and on to whatever business he felt called him next.

Clarke stared after his retreating back and wondered just what the fuck he’d meant by that. Leave unfinished things in the past. He hadn’t, he hadn’t meant… them? Had he?


	8. Chapter 8

“Danny is such a spoiled brat, Nomi!” Madi whispered harshly. And not as quietly as she imagined. Or perhaps didn’t imagine.

“Hush.” Clarke frowned at her daughter.

The collision of two beloved only children, both the apple of the eyes of the adults who had raised them, was going about as well as could be hoped. The age difference had helped, Clarke thought. Largely because whenever his father wasn’t immediately available to him, Danny had been gratifyingly willing to switch his new allegiance to Madi, dogging her steps and mimicking her actions.

This had also rendered him eager to do more or less anything she asked.

That, however, was the problem now. His parents had spent the last few hours absorbed with flight simulators and each other. Not necessarily in that order. Danny had grown bored with his learning games, and with his parents, and wandered off to watch Madi train. He then spent the rest of the time trailing her everywhere she went.

“Nomi! Why does everyone expect me to watch him? Just because I’m the only other kid!” Madi’s voice, while quieter, had taken on the unappealing whine that had marked much of her ninth year.

“No one expects it,” Clarke said briskly, “but Danny has never seen another non-adult in his life. He’s completely fascinated by you. So he’s following you everywhere today. I know it’s strange. You’re also used to being alone. His obsession will wear off. He’ll go back to his normal routines. Just not today. And probably not tomorrow, either. But eventually.”

Madi contorted her face into an expression of dramatic disgust.

Clarke ignored this. “So, if you’d be responsible for him, while he’s got eyes only for you anyway, it’s awfully convenient and frees everyone else for other tasks.”

Clarke wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Danny was sitting fifteen feet away from them, staring at Madi with rapt attention. If he hadn’t been five, and obviously bowled over by the amazing novelty of another kid, it might have been disturbing.

It was nonetheless quite oppressive for Madi.

“What?! That’s not fair!”

Clarke leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, dropping her hands to lap. She looked Madi over carefully before saying, “That’s the way you want to go with this?”

Madi dropped her eyes. “No.”

“Okay then.” Clarke softened her voice, wanting to let Madi know how much she saw and appreciated that this was an effort for her. “I’ll make sure you get a break from him sometime this afternoon.” She offered a smile. “Deal?”

Madi’s answering ‘deal’ was excessively grudging, and she dragged her heels when she went back to Danny, but back toward him she went. Clarke watched her go, then leaned forward again over the laptop Raven had set up for her. She was working on transferring routes and data from her head into the maps on the computer while keeping an ear out for the kids.

And she was keeping an ear out for Bellamy, too.

He and Monty had volunteered to take their overdue turn with running the pumps to refill and flush out the _Gryphon’s_ various hydro systems. Liquid whooshing and metallic clattering noises, and the odd yelp or muffled curse had been echoing around from the far side of the ship in testimony to their labors. Though it had been quieter for a while now. She rather thought they were finished.

It was all so reassuringly normal. If she closed her eyes she could almost transport herself back seven years to those first weeks at the drop ship. Before everything went to hell. When it seemed they had a chance to make a new life on Earth, all of them working together under Bellamy’s strong and sure leadership. When she and he had first begun to work together as a team.

But she couldn’t close her eyes, she reminded herself, or drift off daydreaming about Bellamy. Raven and Roan had gone up to the _Gryphon’s_ flight deck. Or that’s where they had said they were going and Clarke fully intended to take them at their word. That left her on child-watch duty. The children had just settled down with Danny’s trucks when Bellamy rounded the corner from the rear of the ship and ambled towards them.

Clarke peered around her computer to watch with interest.

“Echo and I are headed out to collect more wood,” he said, dropping down to his heels to crouch eye-level with the kids. “You want to come with us? We could use your help.”

From the vaguely suspicious expressions Madi and Danny directed towards Bellamy, it was clear to Clarke that both children were aware that this was a chore, not a treat, they were being invited on.

Bellamy realized this too.

“And I could tell you a story as we walk,” he sweetened the offer.

Madi looked at Danny, who nodded at her very seriously. Clarke couldn’t help but smirk at the way they checked in with each other first. That was a good sign. She was even happier with Madi’s response to Bellamy.

“Deal,” Madi said to him, with a bright grin. “Clarke said you loved history. Do you know real stories, about real people?”

“I do,” he assured her. “Lots.”

He rose to his feet, and turned to Clarke, raising his voice to ask, “Mind if I take the kids? We could use their eyes and hands. Give you some time to finish with the maps.”

“No! Absolutely, take them! In fact…” Clarke answered somewhat incoherently as she struggled to get out of her low-slung canvas chair, intending to invite herself along with their party. The maps could wait. She’d just made it to her feet when Murphy called her name.

“Hey, Clarke! You’ve got wheels. Give us a lift? Harper and I’ve gathered pretty much everything we can find in an easy walk, but we have a bunch of places marked we can go with the Rover, and still be back in a hour.”

 _Damn it!_ There was no possible way she could say no to this very reasonable request, however much she wished she could. For a fleeting second she considered simply telling Murphy to take the Rover himself. But when Clarke opened her mouth to do so, the words wouldn’t come out.

She had no idea if he or Harper had ever driven it in the past, or even knew how, or how to spot obstacles and washouts in the deceptively flat-seeming landscape. And shit, but… she really loved her Rover, and it was the last working one in the world. She glanced over and saw she’d have to run to catch Bellamy and the kids now, anyway. Bellamy had thought he was doing her a favor, taking them off her hands, so he hadn’t lingered.

“Sure,” she said to Murphy, hoping her smile didn’t look as fake as it felt. She told herself it wasn’t as if she and Bellamy could have had any personal conversation anyway on such an outing, and it would give him and Madi another chance to get to know each other better, and without her interference.

“Happy to,” she said to Murphy.

They were gone more than an hour, and by the time they returned the wood gathering party had already come in and left again. Danny had tripped and badly skinned his knees and hands and had to be brought back for first aid and his mother’s attention. Danny and Madi had stayed behind, while Bellamy and Echo had headed back out, along with Monty and Emori. Wood was essential, and after nearly three weeks in place they were scavenging pretty far and wide to gather enough.

One way or another, Clarke realized abruptly, the _Gryphon_ and her crew would soon need to be moving on. Almost as soon as the thought formed, she felt a new set of tensions take up residence between her shoulder blades and begin pressing on her temples.

Time. Time was somehow running out on her. She didn’t know how or why, but it was.

Clarke needed to find a way to speak to Bellamy soon, find out if he wanted to rekindle what had almost begun, or else the press of events was going to rip them away from each other and another moment would be forever lost. She could sense it in the air. Her anxiety level promptly shot up about a hundred and twenty-five percent.

Her next opportunity to talk to him alone. Definitely. She would seize it. She would follow Raven’s advice, and Roan’s, and be blunt and to the point and simply tell him straight out, _‘Bellamy, I’ve been dreaming of building a future with you for six years. I still want that, but if that’s not what you want for yourself, then please, tell me now, and I’ll move on.’_

By mid-afternoon, Danny was close to simply running in circles.

Clarke sympathized. She thought if it could have helped her process her own sense of impending crisis she might have run in circles too.

He’d refused to eat more than half the lunch Raven had pressed on him because he was too wired to sit still. Raven had almost succeeded in encouraging him to settle quietly in the shade with his books, spreading a blanket on the ground and reading aloud to him with Roan stretched out and napping beside them. But the wood gatherers had returned just then, bringing a fresh round of commotion with them.

Soon Danny was simply dashing from his tablet to his trucks to the lakeshore and back again, talking non-stop at anyone close enough to be a reasonable target. His mother looked both frantic and exhausted herself and Danny wasn’t responding to any of her various offers or admonishments. This had the combined effect of making the majority of the _Gryphon_ crew scatter, almost before Clarke had realized what was happening.

Leaving only poor Madi. Danny started simply dragging her by the hand everywhere he wanted to go, lest she too escape when he turned his back.

Clarke was trying to figure out how to intervene to give Madi a break, without actually taking on responsibly for Danny herself because… well, she wasn’t a saint, and Danny was pretty clearly headed for hysteria and a meltdown. Then Roan stepped in.

“Danny, would you like to help me check the crayfish traps?” Roan asked, “I don’t know where they are. You’ll have to show me.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes!” Danny capered about him in glee.

“Come here, then.” Roan dropped down on one knee. “We’d better get your hair out of your eyes. A hunter needs to see.”

Danny dashed over as Roan ripped a loose piece from the hem of his T-shirt.

Roan very gently started working his fingers through the top of Danny’s hair, stroking it away from his face.

Danny held himself so still for this he was barely even breathing.

Roan kept combing and twisting until he’d gathered the top portion of Danny’s curls into a tidy little poof at the back of his head, a miniature of the same tieback he wore himself, and then tied it off.

The little boy never once flinched, his eyes riveted on his father’s face the entire time. The finger-combing also had the effect of drawing tension out of his solid little body, and he was a much more relaxed child by the time Roan had finished.

Then Roan stood and held out his hand, which his son immediately took.

Off they went, strolling in a leisurely way to the lakeshore, headed up towards the marshy section where Clarke had seen stakes with fluttering fabric strips marking the various traps Emori and Murphy had sunk into the soft lake bottom.

“Guh.” Raven folded inward, hugging herself and crossing her legs as she sat where she had collapsed earlier on one of the larger chunks of masonry set around the fire. “That was so hot it actually hurts.”

She did look to be in some sort of mildly ecstatic pain.

“Are you… are you falling in love with your baby daddy?” Harper, the only other person who’d stayed outside with them, asked with a faintly incredulous smile.

“Shut up.” Raven rolled her eyes at Harper as she stood up. She shivered dramatically, then said, “I have to go to the head.”

She started out, then after half a dozen steps paused to toss off a quiet and self-conscious, “Maybe.”

Then she fled.

They watched Raven vanish into the _Gryphon_ , then Harper turned to Clarke, her expression hesitant and doubtful. “Danny will be safe with Roan, right?”

“Of course,” Clarke said, surprised by the question. “Danny will be quite safe on the water with his dad. Roan’s an excellent swimmer. He’s taught both Madi and me how to swim, too. I’m sure he’ll teach Danny soon.”

“No!” Madi’s laugh was arch in the way only a twelve-year old girl could produce. She flung herself down on the ground nearby. “Roan taught me to swim. He taught you not to drown. Mostly.”

Clarke burst out laughing at Madi’s smug little grin. “Yes. True.” Clarke looked back at Harper and shared a conspiratorial smile. “Roan calls my best effort, ‘Advanced flailing.’ But Madi here,” Clarke beamed, “one of these days she’s actually going to beat him when they race.”

Madi sniffed. “He only wins because he’s taller than me, and his arms are longer. Unfair advantage.”

Harper was quiet for a moment, then she said, “Echo tells us that Azgeda men aren’t generally known for their patience with small children. Loving. Very loving, I understand. But, they are known to have very high expectations for respect and obedience. And they can be quick to…” Harper floundered for a word, “correct…”

Clarke interrupted. “I’m going to stop you now.”

Harper looked at her, something muddy and unhappy and stubborn in her eyes.

“Yes.” Clarke said, trying to be understanding yet emphatic and definitive all at once. “Roan is definitely a man of his clan. But his clan is gone and he’s learned to live with a new family. Madi was not quite eight when we found him in Polis. And he did think I was indulging her terribly, and I thought he was an overbearing ass who snapped orders all the time. But, after a lot of talking, he came around to seeing my point of view. He changed.”

“Can you be certain, though?” Harper persevered, her uneasiness still evident in her face. “Danny’s used to our ways. I believe Roan wouldn’t mean to, but he could unintentionally hurt, or frighten…”

“Did you just watch Roan tie back Danny’s hair? After stepping in to redirect him before he reached critical meltdown? Divert and distract? You really think you can’t trust this man with his son? With _any_ child?”

“Do you?”

Clarke got to her feet. “Absolutely. With no doubts.”

And then she walked away. Before she could say anything further. Anything that she might have cause to regret later.

Naturally it was at this moment that she nearly ran right into Bellamy as he came back down the ramp.

Their exclamations of surprise were nearly in sync, both of them rocking backward to avoid the collision.

“Everything okay?” he asked reaching out to steady her, but dropping his hand before he made contact, as it was clear she wasn’t actually tumbling to the ground.

Clarke watched his hand fall with regret, then forced a quick smile.

“Yeah! I’m fine!” she said, brushing away any lingering worry over Harper’s nonsensical worries. Anyone with eyes could see that Roan would never hurt Danny. Or Madi. Or any child entrusted to his care.

The lines between Bellamy’s brows didn’t fade, but he didn’t pursue it, instead asking, “Where are you off to?”

“Didn’t really have a plan. At home, at my camp, I’d be…” she frowned. “Gosh. What would I be doing now? This last week has been so extraordinary I’ve lost complete track. Afternoon lessons, I think? It’s a little early yet for evening chores.”

“Well, if you want to get on with lessons…?”

Clarke shrugged lightly. “No. I’d need a pupil, and she seems to have taken advantage of the circumstances to seize a school holiday!”

She pointed to the edge of the open area, where Madi was just disappearing toward the training ground, then she smiled at Bellamy. “Besides, you got in a history lesson earlier today. Fall of Rome, I understand?”

“I keep telling you, she’s a really smart kid.”

“Yeah,” Clarke beamed at him, her heart feeling absurdly full. “She really is.”

“Thank you for driving Murphy and Harper around,” he said, changing the subject. “They reported you were able to harvest enough roots and tubers today to put a couple of kilos aside for preserving.”

“I need to do my part!”

“Oh. Yes,” he nodded several times. “Of course.”

Clarke could have wished he didn’t sound so surprised by this notion, as though it hadn’t yet occurred to him that she would be a member of his crew.

“Though we should be making some plans, don’t you think?” she said, the knot between her shoulder blades spinning a little tighter. “About the bunker? And Polis? And the _Eligius_?”

“Yes.” His nod this time was much firmer. “I’ve been doing some thinking about that.”

“You said you’ve been tracking the _Eligius_? Was there anything about it in the records you could still find on Go-Sci? Anything that could help us understand them?”

“A little,” Bellamy gestured to a flatish rock jutting into the gentle slope over looking the lake, some little distance from the more open area around the fire pit. “It’s an interesting story.”

It was an interesting story. Like most of the ones from the times before, it was full of amazing, almost unimaginable, wealth and power and technology. All of it put to tasks that to Clarke and Bellamy seemed both inscrutable and pointless.

“Wow,” Clarke said, once he was finished. “I almost feel sorry for the poor bastards.”

“Me, too.”

“I also wish they’d died on the asteroid belt, rather than come back here to fuck up our lives now.” Clarke allowed herself to contemplate, oh so very briefly, that the _Eligius_ crew had probably found their home by now. Her home. Probably torn it up, destroyed what she’d spent six years building, looking for information on the people who’d questioned their crewman and then fled before them. The tightness in her shoulders increased.

“Yeah.” Bellamy sighed regretfully. “I get that.”

Wondering if she’d heard the faintest whiff of criticism in his tone, and still stung by their earlier argument as he’d locked away her heavy guns, she asked, “Do you think that makes me a terrible person?”

“It makes you realistic. Given what we’ve all lived through.”

This sounded more placating than conciliatory, and with visions of her stolen home dancing in her head, Clarke was opening her mouth to pursue what exactly he meant, when the sound of splashing on the water drew their attention.

Roan, his shirt stripped off in the hazy late-day heat, was standing next to an equally shirtless Danny. They were nearly to the other side of the vaguely crescent shaped portion of the shore watched over by the _Gryphon_. The two of them were gazing after a series of circles of diminishing sizes fade away on the still surface of the water.

“What are they doing?” Bellamy asked, looking perplexed.

At the same time, Roan was pointing to the ground and showing something to Danny.

“Skipping stones.” Clarke laughed and shook her head, four years on still baffled by the appeal. “It’s a thing. An Earther thing. Roan says almost all kids do it. Especially boys. And former kids. Like him.”

Roan picked up something at his feet, then turned and spun it out over the still, late afternoon lake. The stone arced across the water, bouncing off the surface seven or eight times, before petering out in a series of small hops too small and close together to count.

Danny naturally copied him immediately. He curled up his arm in the wrong direction and his rock didn’t even make it to the water’s edge. Roan retrieved the stone, then crouched down to rearrange Danny’s body, showing him how to find the proper way to hold the stone, how to cock his wrist, how to get the spin on the release.

Clarke and Bellamy watched in companionable silence as Roan helped Danny throw several more stones, celebrating wildly with him when his final effort yielded an actual skip, two bright circles on the lake’s still surface. That this was mostly the result of Roan’s guiding hand didn’t seem to bother either of them in the least. Their hooting calls of triumph echoed across the quiet water.

Then Clarke started to chuckle.

“What?” Bellamy asked.

“Look,” Clarke said.

Madi had re-appeared and was striding down to join Roan and Danny, no doubt drawn from the training area by the same sounds on the water that had caught Bellamy’s attention.

“Couple of hours ago she was complaining that Danny wouldn’t leave her alone, and now that he has Roan’s undivided attention, here she comes,” Clarke gestured with her chin. “Watch.”

Madi was very good at skipping stones, having learned in much the same way as Danny was beginning to, and from the same teacher. Her first throw produced a respectable five skips, and her second a blazing nine. She and Roan exchanged whooping hand slaps, and then after a pause so tiny Clarke suspected most would have missed it, so did she and Danny.

On his next throw, Danny had Madi behind him, coaching him through it, while Roan looked on.

Clarke looked over at Bellamy, ready to share her delighted grin, but his expression was quieter and more thoughtful as he watched the three figures on the far shore.

Trying to make out the source of his mood change, Clarke hazarded, “Is it strange to see Danny with another man?”

It was something she’d wondered about, a few times, in passing. Danny had looked so comfortable in Bellamy’s arms, when Clarke had mistaken him for Bellamy’s son. Had it been hard for Bellamy to see Danny transfer his attention so completely to Roan?

“What?” Bellamy turned to look at her in confusion, then he smiled teasingly. “Monty? Murphy?”

“Oh.” Clarke wrinkled her nose in embarrassment. She’d really had no reason to think that Bellamy had been the primary male figure in Danny’s life. Danny truly seemed no more attached to him than to any other member of the crew. His mother was obviously the central focus of his world, the person he turned to for comfort and attention and permission and praise. But Clarke had just assumed, because of Octavia… “Right.”

Bellamy waved this away, letting her know not to be concerned. “Raven never let any of us step into Roan’s place in Danny’s life. She was very, very firm about that. You saw that book of illustrations last night! And in Roan’s absence, she would do for Danny by herself as much as she could. She was really self-conscious about how much extra burden having Danny placed on the rest of us. ‘My kid, my responsibility’, she says. Well,” Bellamy shrugged, nodding across the water, “ _Said_ , I guess, now.”

“But you all helped her! In all your stories!”

“Yes. Helped. All we could. All she’d allow. As friends. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins. Whatever labels fit, I suppose. But we were none of us his dad. Who really was alive and waiting for her here on Earth.” Bellamy shook his head then, chuckling under his breath, as though he was still amazed and amused and mystified all at once. “Raven was right all along.”

“Well. Yes. Here we are.”

“Yes, here you are.” Bellamy smiled briefly at Clarke before turning back to look across the water. “Though that’s not what I was thinking about. Instead I was wondering, for the first time in a very long time, what my own dad was like. If he would’ve taught me how to skip stones. If he’d ever had the chance.”

Bellamy fell silent then. Clarke had no idea quite how to follow up on this. He hadn’t been thinking about her at all.

She wasn't the first thing on his mind.

He was caught up in his own musings about fathers and fatherhood. This was the first time he’d ever mentioned his father to her. She suddenly realized that she didn’t even know how old Bellamy had been when his dad had died.

Bellamy turned his head to catch her eye. “You knew your dad. Would he have skipped stones?”

Clarke thought back to her memories of Jake Griffin, tall and strong, lover of sports and games and balls, and good with his hands. She chuckled softly. “Oh yes. Definitely. He would have been a very enthusiastic and competitive stone-skipper.”

Clarke looked over at Bellamy and saw his tentative smile, his open expression, and told herself to just get it the hell over with. Rip off the cover, stare straight into the abyss, and if the answer wasn’t the one she wanted, then so be it. Then she could get on with things. All the things. Whatever they turned out to be.

The pressure was building, like a storm.

She remembered her speech, got it re-fixed in her head, _“Bellamy, I’ve been dreaming of building a future with you for six years. I still want that, but if that’s not what you want for yourself, then please, tell me now, and I’ll move on.”_ She took a deep breath, and straightened her back.

“Bellamy! Roan!” Echo was standing by the fire pit with Harper and Monty, her hands cupped to her lips as she hailed the two men. “Bellamy? Roan? We could use your help!”

Clarke could have bounced up and shaken her fists at the sky and yelled curses, only then she would have had to explain herself. And that would have made pretty much everyone die of embarrassment.

Particularly Bellamy, if his answer was going to be _No, I’m sorry, I don’t love you like that._

So she did not. Instead she let Bellamy pull her to feet to go find out what the latest development was.

She’d have to find another moment, and soon, though. It had been sensible to set aside their more personal concerns when they were racing across the burned-over land, abandoning the Green to the invaders from the Eligius. But their temporary respite was ending, and Clarke needed to know what direction she was headed next. Literally and figuratively.

She knew very well that what she wanted was to head out side by side with Bellamy, aligned as partners, as leaders, and as lovers. But if that wasn’t going to happen, if she was going to be hurt, she wanted to know sooner rather than later. The faster her heartbreak began, the faster she might get over it and be able to turn her whole self to other things.


	9. Chapter 9

The footings for the spit and grill had collapsed.

With investigation they’d discovered that the fire had found a channel under the soil and smoldered and charred its way beyond the boundaries of the lined pit. Repairing the damage – hot, messy, gritty work – ate up what was left of the afternoon.

Clarke joined Harper and Raven and Madi in the hunt for more rocks or chunks of old masonry to repair the damage. Toting each find back to the growing pile, and struggling to avoid letting her gaze linger on the group laboring with shovels to dig out the smoldering channel and then refill and reshape the pit.

Roan was already shirtless. Murphy and Monty rapidly joined him. Echo retained her workout bra, but also chose to protect her shirt from the greasy soot of the cooking pit by stripping it off.

Clarke’s desire for pencils or paints flared up again. Most of her drawings of people had been focused on faces, or trying to capture some memory of their personality or character in their clothes or their gestures.

But watching the group work now, shirtless in the hot sun, sweat glistening on their torsos and shoulders as they bent and tossed aside masonry or shovels full of dirt, and she wanted to try studies of movement. The human body, in almost idealized form, at work.

Roan and Echo were almost a matched pair, lean and strong, long muscles from a lifetime of running and archery. The movement sketches she could draw unfolded effortlessly in Clarke’s imagination– lines, proportions, muscles, joints.

Murphy and Monty gave her a little pause, a strange half-maternal, half-not-very-maternal awareness that they were no longer skinny teenagers but fully-matured men. Slim still, but filled out now, with finished, heavy muscle groups across their shoulders and backs, and dense biceps that hadn’t been there before. Pictures bloomed in Clarke’s imagination, quarter poses, torsos, shoulder studies.

Bellamy resisted stripping for a while, until he looked down to see a large black smear across his belly, swore, and yanked his own shirt over his head.

Clarke’s sense of artistic detachment vanished.

Her mouth went dry, then immediately filled. She had to swallow several times, and still felt like she might choke on her own spit.

He was.

He was more beautiful than she’d allowed herself to remember. All her private fantasies, so well-worn, so carefully rendered, had been wholly inadequate to the task of fully recreating an image of Bellamy Blake.

When he’d already been out in the sun without his shirt she didn’t know, but the skin of his back and chest was already the same deep warm copper as his neck and forearms. His shoulders and biceps were broader than ever, making his waist seem narrower still. The definition across his chest and abs was clearer. The channel down his back, defined by corded muscles as he bent and jammed the shovel deep with his boot, made her jaw ache. When he twisted and raised his arms to toss a shovel full of dirt up over the edge, she could see the sharp line of his Adonis belt and she had to actually close her eyes against the sight.

Her breasts felt heavy and she was sure her nipples were hard. They were certainly unusually tender, pressed up against the heavy fabric of her bra. Her sympathy for Raven’s declaration of arousal so intense it was _painful_ went up several notches. She’d thought that was a vaguely silly and embarrassing overstatement. No one could really feel that way. Now she understood, fellow-sufferer of the same malady, that it was merely an expression of truth.

As soon as the burn channel was refilled and the pit reshaped, Bellamy scooped up his shirt and vaulted out of the pit. “You’re better at this kind of work than me,” he said to Monty. “I’m just in the way.”

Raven sidled closer to Clarke, who was watching Bellamy’s retreating back as he made his way to the lakeshore, crouching down at the edge to splash water on his face and arms.

“How’s it going today?” she murmured.

“Fine!” Clarke lied brightly.

Raven just raised her brows and stared hard.

“It’s… not going like how I’d imagined it would be.” Clarke broke almost instantly, thoroughly relieved to be able to say something about her inner turmoil aloud to a sympathetic listener. “I wanted it to be easy. Natural. Like you and Roan.”

Raven grinned a little sheepishly. “We’re both on our super best behavior right now.”

“And it helps that you both want the same thing.”

Raven chuckled self-consciously, “Well, close enough.” But then she drew her brows together uneasily. “Don't you? Both of you were always looking to each other, looking out for each other. So focused on each other. We all believed that you were headed for… you know…” Raven trailed off.

“I don’t know. Maybe? We never talked about…” Clarke shrugged a little helplessly. “Just lots of...almost. Not like you and Roan.” This last came out more sad-sounding than she’d thought it would, but she didn’t try to take it back.

“We definitely raced right on past _almost_.” Raven’s expression turned wry, and she jerked her chin at her son, who was ‘helping’ adjust the masonry.

“A months long affair!”

Raven looked at her with an odd expression. “Weeks. Scarcely.”

Clarke wrinkled her brow. “What?”

After looking at her carefully, Raven cocked her head. “Do you remember when you told us to break up, before anyone got hurt?”

“That was only a suggestion.”

Raven rolled her eyes at Clarke’s attempt to minimize, but otherwise let it go. “It was also completely bizarre because we’d barely started hooking up, right there on Becca’s Island. Just days before that. No words. Just an eye lock in the elevator. Head tilt. Then fucking.” Raven’s eyelids fluttered and her breath caught as she shuddered at the memory. “Really intense fucking.”

Clarke couldn’t do anything other than stare. Through four years of what she had thought were soul-baring confidences, Roan had kept this bit of information entirely to himself.

“But,” Raven didn’t seem to notice Clarke’s surprise, “When you said that, you were so obnoxious and so earnest.” She laughed, but it was teasing and kind.

“You told me to float myself!” Clarke reminded her, feeling more affronted about this than she had in years.

Raven nodded. “Yep. And then Roan kissed me. Right in front of the whole lab. Remember?”

“Uh. Yeah. It was very thorough.”

“Yes.” Raven’s smile was full of smug delight at the memory, “Really laid one on, didn’t he?”

“Humph,” Clarke sniffed.

“After you left – I asked him what the fuck he was doing, kissing me like that. In front of everyone. He told me he was tired of listening to you tell him what to do. That he liked hearing me tell you to mind your own business.”

“Thanks,” Clarke said drily.

“I said I totally understood how he felt. And we started talking. About you.” Raven lifted an apologetic shoulder. “But then about our lives before you. And then all sorts of other things. That’s when I learned he’s actually an interesting guy who’d lived an interesting life, by anyone’s standards. We ended up talking all night. We were still just _talking_ when dawn came...”

“Oh,” Clarke said blankly, “wow.”

Raven lifted her shoulders and opened her hands, still seeming vaguely amazed by the outcome. “That’s when _we_ really started. When he started pushing me to think of a way to flush out the last of ALIE. After you stuck your oar in.” Then she bestowed another brilliant smile on Clarke. “I guess you could say I owe you another thank you.”

“Raven! We talked about this. Stop with the thanks.”

And then Raven sobered completely. “So here’s my plain advice. You have to make the first move. You need to tell Bellamy what you feel, and what you want. In very plain language. No hinting. Spell it out.”

“I…what? Um. Yes.” Clarke blinked at the speed of the subject shift. If it had been a subject shift. “I know!”

“I’m not sure you do.” Raven was shaking her head. “Bellamy mourned you, in private, even though he’d agreed to believe you’d survive. He mourned all his missed chances with you. But, and this is important, Clarke, so listen to me carefully.”

Clarke nodded, a little shaken by Raven’s sudden fierceness.

“He also wondered if he’d made too much of things. If your feelings, yours and his both, were the result of circumstance, heightened live-or-die situations. Of youth and inexperience. He’s been half-way to convincing himself for years now that your first preferences really are for women, and that your intense feelings for him as a partner and a friend and a co-leader got all caught up with other things and confused matters. That in another place and time, without the pressures, you would, at best, have become friends. Or maybe not even that.”

“He told you all this?” Clarke nearly gasped, shaken to her core that Bellamy would have thought such things. Revealed such things aloud. To Raven! Despite all the heart-to-heart talking she and Roan had done. She knew this was wildly hypocritical. She didn’t care.

“No. These are all my words, not his. But, oh God, Clarke. Space was hard, okay. A lot of what we went through was so fucking hard. And what I did, in choosing to have Danny, made everything so damn much harder on everyone else.”

Clarke started to say, “A baby…”

“No. Clarke. Listen to me.” Raven was frowning now and leaning closer.

“Okay!”

“I was a profoundly shitty pregnant person. I doubt I’d ever be a great pregnant person, but under those conditions, I was awful. I was sick, I was hungry all the time. I had constant back pain. As Danny got bigger he was sitting right on the damaged part of my spine. I was terrified I’d done a deeply wrong thing to bring a baby into such a horrible world. So I was a bitch. Not a little bitch. A raving, horrendous, hideous bitch. To everyone. Twenty-four seven.”

“I’m sorry.” Clarke was leaning back now, trying to find some distance from Raven’s intensity.

“The eighth month was a glorious relatively pain-free oasis, or they might have just spaced me.”

“They wouldn’t!” Clarke’s attempt at reassurance was weak and wasted.

Raven just raised an eyebrow. “Not according to Murphy. But that wasn’t the worst.”

“Not the worst?” How was getting teased about being spaced for being pregnant – on the fucking Ark, no less – not the worst?

Raven barreled right on over Clarke’s faint question. “I took a pretty deep dive into post-partum depression. I hardly got out of bed, except to eat, for weeks and weeks after Danny was born. Which I did only because Danny would have died if I didn’t. I’d sit in the mess and cry so hard trying to choke down Monty’s godawful soup that I’d end up barfing it all back up again. But if I didn’t get something down, I couldn’t nurse Danny, and we had no way to make him formula. Because he was the only thing that made the day a little less bleak, and I was the one who’d brought him into the world, and I owed him, I got it down.”

“Raven, I…” Clarke didn’t even know what expression to put on her face.

“It’s okay, Clarke. I was sick. I got well. But we didn’t have any anti-depressants, and I had to nurse Danny anyway. Informal group therapy guided by question prompts we found in the database was all we had. And God knows every single one of us had plenty of stress and trauma to work through. So Bellamy and I talked all the way through a lot of deep night watches. And that’s why I know what I know, and why I think what I think.”

This time Raven paused, clearly waiting for a sign from Clarke, who merely said. “Oh.”

“I know I’m overstepping by even telling you this, but good God. Watching you two circle each other while we wait for another disaster to strike…” Raven huffed in exasperation. “Watching you stare at him just now, looking like the most forlorn abandoned kid in the corner at the Unity Day dance, damn near panting from want…”

Clarke felt her cheeks and neck heat with embarrassment. She wanted to find a dark quiet corner and hide for while. Everyone knew. Everyone pitied her. And Bellamy had just run away.

“But he’s such a fucking idiot he’s never really been sure that your romantic feelings for him were anything other than a confused crush on the part of someone who’d just spent a year in solitary and then imprinted on the first dynamic person they saw. Feelings that would naturally pass with time.”

“That’s not…!” Clarke very nearly swayed in dismay.

Raven interrupted. “I’m not saying that’s what you felt. I don’t think it is or was. I’m telling you that’s what I believe he thinks now.”

All Clarke could do was shake her head; dumbfounded that Bellamy could have gotten everything so wrong, so muddled in his thinking during his long years in space.

Raven raised her hands in a gesture of utter helplessness and shrugged. “I decided I’d jam my oar in. Pay you back. Hope it makes a difference. So listen to me, Clarke. Have you done anything since he found you to let him know that’s not true? That he’s wrong?”

Clarke was saved from confessing, out loud, that the horrifying true answer might very well be, _no, maybe she hadn’t_ – because she had in no way known it might be necessary! – by a new stirring around the repairs to the firepit.

They seemed to be finished. Murphy and Monty were stacking wood for a new fire. Roan and Echo were headed straight for the water’s edge, Madi and Danny trailing after them. All of them covered in dirt and grime. Echo and Roan paused only to drop their belts and knives to the shore before fully wading thigh deep into the water, scooping up wet handfuls of bottom sand to scrub the grit and greasy soot from their arms and faces, turning to scrub each other’s backs and shoulders. Madi and Danny followed them out, splashing enthusiastically, but with much less noticeable scrubbing.

Raven and Clarke moved closer to the shore, while Raven called out to her son to actually scrub the dirt off his hands and face. She finally strode down to hold his head and firmly attack the grime herself while he made terrible faces and complained loudly.

As soon as he had the fire burning, Murphy followed the rest into the lake. Monty declined Murphy’s entreaties to follow them.

“No way, man. I spent my morning flushing and refilling the tanks on board. I’m headed for a well-earned hot shower.” And off he went.

Madi seized the opportunity to show off her swimming abilities, striking out for the open water with a strong overhead stroke. Echo followed after her, quickly catching up and leading Madi deeper and faster. Murphy started cheering them on.

“Raven?” Harper called from the open hatch, “Do you know where the bag of vegetables for tonight got to? We should start cleaning them for supper.”

Raven stood up and frowned, her glance darting back and forth between her son and Harper.

“Go on,” Clarke said. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

She meant to. She really did. But she was also half-watching Madi and Echo, who had reached some ancient submerged structure, one that allowed them to climb onto it and stand with the water to their knees and then dive back in, over and over. They were calling for Roan to swim out to them. He was clearly torn, looking over his shoulder for Raven, who had disappeared with Harper, to Danny, and then back out to waving figures standing on the rock or reef or building.

Danny was splashing around in ankle-deep shallows, lost in some world of his own. Clarke was watching Madi dive, not really marking the significance of Danny wandering closer to the pile of discarded belts and weapons. Before Clarke had grasped his intentions, he’d reached down for his father’s big knife, hefted it up and slipped it gently free from the heavy oiled-leather sheath.

Clarke’s heart nearly stopped. That knife was honed so fine it sliced paper clean. If Danny dropped it the wrong way it could slice open his leg or his foot, or a toe clean off.

“Danny,” she called, trying to move as quickly as possible without appearing to hurry. Startling him now would do no good at all. “Danny,” she said, her voice slow and calm, “that’s not a good thing to play with.”

And then out of fucking thin air, Roan was there, one big hand almost engulfing Danny’s whole forearm, the other gently but firmly wrapping around the hilt of his knife.

Bringing his face down nearly level with his small son’s, and adding a bit more growl than usual for emphasis, he said, “Never touch someone else’s weapons. Ask for them to share with you, and if they say no, don’t ask again.”

Roan held his gaze until Danny, his eyes filling with tears, his lip trembling, but otherwise frozen in shock, finally nodded and released his hold on the knife. Then Roan dropped his arm, slid the knife back into its sheath, and stood, collecting the rest of his and Echo’s weapons and belts from the ground as he did so. His eyes never left Danny’s face.

“Do you understand me?” Roan asked.

Danny nodded.

“Okay.” Roan nodded back. “We’re good.”

Raven had reappeared, unnoticed, while this was happening. Clarke had no idea how much, or how little of it, she’d witnessed.

“Everything all right now?” Raven called out.

“Everything is fine,” Roan replied. “I’ll go find our shirts.”

Raven nodded, then continued on to join Harper who was already seated by the fire trimming and peeling the tubers and roots Clarke had helped gather earlier that day.

Danny immediately followed his mother, arriving just as she seated herself. Before his tears could fall, she said briskly, “Nope. No tears for you. You knew that was wrong before you did it.”

He wrapped his arms around her neck anyway, burying his face in her back as she worked. But he didn’t cry. So Clarke figured that was a win, and came over to join in with the meal prep.

Monty and Bellamy arrived, ready to start with water hauling and filtering and boiling, and Murphy was beginning to work with the crawfish collected from the traps. Madi and Echo were swimming for shore.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it for Danny.

Danny didn’t cry, but he wasn’t satisfied to be ignored. He swung himself slowly around Raven’s neck, his face still pressed against her, trying to wiggle into her lap as she worked at slicing the roots for supper. Raven barred him with her arm, and ignored him, but he stayed close, and started twisting his fingers into her ponytail. He wound his fingers tighter and tighter until she had to bend her head towards him to relieve the pressure on her scalp.

“Danny!” She exclaimed in exasperation, taking her long hair from his hands and shaking him off again. “Stop. We’re working now. You can play by yourself until the food is ready, or,” Raven looked around for distraction and saw the swimmers were shaking themselves off on shore, “Ask Madi if she’ll play a game with you.”

Danny dropped his eyes and his hands. For about thirty seconds. And then he was right back at it, hanging on Raven’s arm and playing with her hair.

“Danny! Get off.” Raven’s voice was sharper now, and more irritated, as she shook him off again. This time she actually pushed him to his feet and stiff-armed him off and away. “Go entertain yourself.”

Danny backed off, but Clarke could tell from his grin that he’d elected to make a game of it. Sure enough, a minute later, he was creeping in from behind, and had his hands around Raven’s neck and was bowing her back with his full weight.

“Danny!” Raven shook him off again, more forcefully this time.

Danny giggled, and made to come in again.

“Daniel.”

This was not Raven’s voice. It was Roan’s.

He was back, clearly having found their shirts. Fully dressed and staring directly at his son.

Danny froze, his eyes wide. With his hair pulled back, his light eyes were very striking.

“Do as your mother says.”

Danny, darting his eyes around in every direction except Roan, clearly debated with himself what to do next. He chose to risk ignoring his father. He started towards Raven.

Roan strode over, scooped Danny up by his upper arms and carried him off into the _Gryphon_ , the metal of the ramp ringing very loudly under his booted feet in the evening stillness.

Danny was too surprised to resist or even make a sound until they were nearly at the hatch door, and his wail of protest was cut short almost immediately after they entered.

Raven watched them go, swallowed hard, then looked back at the root in her hand and went back to scraping it clean.

“Raven?” Monty asked. “You sure about this?”

“I’ll go after him, if you like,” Bellamy added.

Raven kept her eyes on her hands. “I wanted his dad in his life. In our lives. This is having his dad.”

Madi scanned all the worried faces, and then she turned to Clarke, her expression full of questions. Clarke shrugged at her a little helplessly. This was not her set of concerns, and so definitely NOT her place to intervene.

“But do you trust him?” Harper asked Raven, her brows drawn down and her voice tight with anxiety.

Madi was staring at the _Gryphon_ crew, her mouth falling open in astonishment. Her indignation mounting, she exclaimed, “Trust him? Trust Roan? Trust him for what?”

Murphy shrugged. “His kid just directly challenged him. He looked pissed.”

“No, he didn’t!” Madi objected.

“He looked angry to me,” Harper said, her gentle expression not masking the sharpness of her tone. “And we don’t want him to hurt Danny.”

“Hurt…! Hurt Danny?” Madi was too shocked to continue. She whirled back to Clarke, her expression one of offended expectation, and yet full of perfect faith that Clarke would set these strangers straight. That Clarke would defend Roan from these horrible lies. “Nomi! Tell them!”

“Madi,” Clarke temporized, trying to navigate this horribly unexpected chasm. She wanted to be truthful and honest. She wanted to defend Roan. But she also knew that their fears were completely reasonable. They really had no way to know how much he personally had changed and adapted because of Clarke. Because of Madi. She also didn’t want to take sides, or antagonize anyone.

“They don’t know him like we do,” she settled on. “How much he’s learned about a different kind of parenting in the last four years.”

“He’s not Madi’s parent, though, is he?” Bellamy said. “You are. Of course he respects that boundary. It’s going to be different with his own son.”

“We’re family. He’s an authority figure in Madi’s life, and a partner in mine!” Clarke declared, trying frantically to figure out how she went from placating Madi to defending her own choices in the blink of an eye. She rounded on Bellamy, stung to the quick that his doubts extended from her weapons to her judgment about her own child, about any child. “And I assure you, he’s not going to be different with Danny.”

“He’s Azgeda,” Echo spoke up. “We were all raised the same way. Children obey, or suffer the consequences.”

“Of course!” Clarke said, feeling the whole conversation slipping entirely from her control. “There are always consequences. They just don’t involve violence or beatings, which is what I thought you were all so afraid of?”

“Yes,” Harper said, her expression defiant and angry. “It is.”

“Clarke!” Madi cried.

Clarke looked at Harper’s angry face and Murphy’s glower. Bellamy’s closed expression and folded arms.

“They’re not wrong,” Clarke said to her daughter, trying to make her voice as gentle and soothing as possible. “Grounder practices were different from ours on the Ark. Much more emphasis on instant obedience. And it did take Roan a while to adapt to…”

“I’m a grounder, Clarke! Just like Roan! Just like Echo!”

“I know, honey, but…”

Madi, speechless with fury, leapt to her feet and charged off toward the training ground at the back of the _Gryphon_.

Clarke rose as well, shooting an angry glare around the fire. How the hell she’d ended up the bad guy here she had no idea!

One minute everything seemed to be going so well! Madi was swimming out to the middle of the lake. Training with Echo and Harper and Emori. Playing with and minding Danny. Building on her relationship with Bellamy, bonding with him over her interest in history and the lives of ‘real people’ in the past.

And now, boom.

One moment of misunderstanding, one moment of crossed wires over how Roan was fitting into Raven’s and Danny’s lives, and Bellamy was darkly glowering. Murphy and Monty looked ready to spring into a fight. Harper was upset and rigid with tension. Raven was hunched and miserable.

And Madi had stormed away in a high passion, convinced that Clarke didn’t have her back when it counted.

Clarke herself was in the middle, feeling pulled in every direction all at once. Wanting everyone to be happy, wanting everyone to just see that they all were in total agreement. To stop being so suspicious of each other’s motives and actions, and just fucking listen to each other, and to themselves. Maybe before they accused each other of violent impulses for no reason! Before they sent her daughter off in tears of rage.

In complete exasperation, Clarke took off after Madi, wondering how the hell she’d be able explain things to her daughter that she wasn’t sure she fully understood herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I broke this chapter up into smaller pieces - changing the final chapter count. I kept adding more words...!


	10. Chapter 10

“Madi!” Clarke called, jogging to catch up. “Wait.”

Madi turned, her cheeks flushed with emotion. “I can’t believe them! Why would they think that? Why would you defend them? Why didn’t you defend _him_?”

“It’s complicated, Madi...”

“It is NOT complicated!” Madi cried, flinging her hands up the air. “Danny was being a brat, just like he was all day. He was being horrible to his mom. He needed someone to step in and call him out! Roan was the only one to help her!”

“It’s not our place…”

“It’s Roan’s place! And no one else was stepping up! I can’t believe you’re taking their side on this!” Madi was nearly weeping she was so furious.

“I’m not taking anyone’s side! There is no ‘side’ here!” Clarke wanted to rub the tension out of her forehead but knew better than to betray weakness like that. “They’re worried that in anger, Roan might frighten Danny, and that’s a reasonable concern.”

“It is not!” Madi exclaimed. “I pissed him off once. Really, really pissed him off. I know what that looks like. That is _terrifying_. This? This is not even a little angry!”

“What are you talking about?” Clarke was bewildered, and trying desperately to remember any time that Roan had ever been terrifyingly angry with Madi. Short-tempered, yes. Snappish? Absolutely. Full of unreasonable expectations of instant obedience? Definitely. But angry?

“The fletching feathers?” Madi snapped, thrusting her head forward with an expression modeled exactly on Roan’s ‘why am I talking to idiots’ face.

“Oh.” Now Clarke remembered, and cringed. “Oh…Yes.” He’d been so furious. Understandably so. “That. Yes.”

“What happened then?”

Clarke and Madi both whirled in shock.

Bellamy was standing behind them, his hands on his hips and his expression, behind his beard, grim and foreboding.

Madi glared daggers at him.

Clarke edged herself forward, between her daughter and Bellamy, directing his attention on herself. How dared he come for Madi like this. “I hardly think this is the time or the place…”

“We’re Danny’s family. I don’t care how happy Raven is to have Roan back from the dead. If he’s a threat to her or her son, then he’s not welcome here.”

“He’s NOT a threat!” Clarke declared, finally beginning to get really angry herself. She’d vouched for Roan. More than once. That should be enough! “I have no idea where and why you all got so obsessed with this…”

“Why doesn’t he live with you in the Green?” Bellamy challenged her. “Did you throw him out?”

“What? He does live there!” Guilt and apprehension suddenly rocketed up Clarke’s spine. “The Green is his home as much as it’s ours because we’re a family, too. He just gets restless. This last year, waiting and wondering about you all in space, about everyone in the bunker, was really fucking hard!”

“You didn’t force him to leave?”

“No!” Guilt was clawing at her heart now, but she ignored it. Told herself that Bellamy wasn’t asking if Roan had left so often because three years ago she’d been too much of a bitch to agree to visit the remains of Azgeda. Or because he hadn’t felt included as a full partner in ordering their lives in the Green. Because Clarke hadn’t wanted to share.

“Roan’s a free agent,” she said. “He comes and goes as he will. We’re always sorry to see him leave and glad to have him home. We absolutely wish he would stay longer than he does.” And that was the perfect truth.

Bellamy looked entirely unconvinced. If anything, he looked more suspicious and angry than before. “So. You’re family. The three of you. And you have absolute confidence that whatever Azgeda practices with children might have been, Roan has left them behind.”

Clarke drew herself up. “Yes!”

“So what happened when you did make him really angry?” Bellamy swung his head sharply, directing his question to Madi.

Madi cast a startled glance at Clarke. “Nomi?”

“If you feel comfortable sharing, it’s okay. Go ahead. But you don’t have to.” Clarke shot Bellamy a resentful glare as she said this. He had no right to force confessions out of Madi.

After a few seconds of eyeing Bellamy with an air of complete and total resentment, Madi straightened her back, squared her shoulders, and took a deep breath.

“Roan makes and repairs all his own arrows,” Madi said, starting her tale at the beginning. “He collects and saves materials in a box in our camp. Once, when I was a lot littler than I am now, during one of Roan’s first trips away out in the world after he came to us, I…”

Madi paused to look at Clarke from under her lashes. Clarke shrugged faintly. She knew what was coming.

Madi continued, “…Borrowed the box. I thought the fletching materials, the feathers and the ancient plastics, were beautiful.” She addressed this last to Bellamy, with a faint chin lift. “And I used them to make dresses and houses for the fairies I pretended lived down by the spring. And I played with them for days.”

Madi glanced again at Clarke. “I didn’t tell Nomi.”

“No.” Clarke agreed with a quick flattening of her lips. “No, you did not.”

“After a while I forgot about them.” Madi twisted her own lips, full of understanding, now, for the error she’d made. “Until Roan got home. When he opened the box to make some repairs, I knew what he’d find. Nothing.”

Madi raised her eyes to Bellamy’s now, and her expression wasn’t full of regret any longer, but of challenge. “The box was empty. I saw his face…he looked right at me. He knew it was me, because he’d caught me playing with them before and told me to leave them alone. Not to touch them because they were essential to our survival. And he was so angry, then. So angry he couldn’t even talk.”

Madi paused, folding her arms across her chest and raising her own chin to stare down her nose, height difference be damned. Another pose modeled directly on Roan.

Waiting for Bellamy to ask.

Which he did, his voice neutral now and his eyes watchful, finally keenly aware that he was being baited by a furious adolescent. “What happened then?”

Madi tossed her hair. “I ran. I just ran.”

Clarke nodded in confirmation. That’s what Madi had done.

“Nomi found me. Hours and hours later.”

“You were nine. It wasn’t really that many hours later,” Clarke said. And Madi had gone straight to the cellar, the safest place she knew.

“She made me come back and tell Roan what I’d done. He told me that he was very disappointed in me. And then I had to spend the whole rest of the summer with him, every single day, sun or rain, out in the woods and on the edge of the burned lands, looking for replacement materials. Until the box was full again.”

Madi curled her lip at Bellamy. “He is such a monster.”

Bellamy dropped his arms and rocked a little, appearing to be suitably chagrined, as Madi continued.

“It was one of the best summers of my life. I learned more about the woods that summer, about hunting, about tracking, about weather… and about not touching things that don’t belong to me without asking permission.”

Clarke concluded, “An important lesson for everyone.”

And then she winced, because her tone had been just about as pompously parental as anything she’d yet said in her entire life. Even her mother would be awed. She’d now set the bar for any further childrearing platitudes stratospherically high.

“Thank you for sharing,” Bellamy told Madi politely, relaxing his posture and bowing his head. “That was very generous of you. I shouldn’t have been so suspicious.”

“Go on back to the others Madi,” Clarke dismissed her daughter. She didn’t need an audience for what she intended to say next.

Clarke waited until Madi was out of earshot before she whirled on Bellamy. “Don’t you ever make Madi feel the need to defend Roan or me again. Don’t put her in that position. That is not your place. You want to call Roan or me out? Fine. We’re adults. You come to us directly. We can defend ourselves. You leave her out it.”

Bellamy met her stare headlong. “Okay. Fine. I can respect that. But what I want to know now is… how long did it take you to talk him out of beating her? How many hours did Madi wait in fear?”

“You…” Clarke opened and closed her mouth a few times. How could he be so right and so impossibly wrong all at once? “You absolute ass,” she hissed. “That was _never_ on the table. Yes, Roan and I had a screaming fight, which I don’t even know how you guessed that!” It was a hell of a time for Bellamy to suddenly be in sync with her again! “But it wasn’t about his desire to beat a goddamn child. It was about my poor habits of supervision. My carelessness. My spoiling her. _My_ failures. He blamed me. Not Madi. As he should have. I was the adult in charge.”

Bellamy’s frown deepened.

“I’m not always very good at it. Just now! I was supposed to be watching Danny. If I’d been more on top of things, Danny never even would have got his hands on Roan’s knife. But I let my attention wander. It was Roan who got there first.”

“If it was so dangerous, he shouldn’t have just left it there!”

“Okay, yeah, Roan probably shouldn’t have just dropped it with his things and Echo’s. We’re out of practice with a small kid around. But Raven was still right there on shore when he did. Then she left, and it was on me, and I didn’t go pick the weapons up or keep track of Danny. I didn’t stay on task.”

“It was hardly your fault!”

“Listen, bitter truth here, Bellamy. Roan is actually a much better kid minder than I am.”

“Clarke!” His protest was immediate, gratifying … and entirely misplaced.

“No.” Clarke shook her head. “No. I love being Madi’s mom. Loving her. Teaching her. Worrying about her. Watching her grow. Planning out what we should do next. But the boring repetitive shit? I hate that. I’m not good at it. Roan called it me spoiling her. It was really mostly me losing focus because I was, I am, way more interested in the next fun thing.”

“You are the most focused person I’ve ever known!”

“Big picture, Bellamy!” Clarke flung up her arms in frustration. “Big picture! I literally did not see the feathers and plastics she’d left tucked all about the spring to make fairy houses.”

“Well, that's…” Bellamy attempted to wave this away.

Clarke frowned, realizing he still wasn’t understanding her. She moved on to her conclusion anyway. It was so much more important. “You have got to stop obsessing about how Roan might hurt Danny. Especially in front of Madi.”

Clarke thought again of Madi’s expression of furiously hurt betrayal, felt a stab of hot pain in her chest, and added for emphasis, “ **Never** in front of Madi. Complain to each other if you have to, or me or Roan himself if you absolutely can’t hold it in, but you keep your complaints about Roan locked down and away from her, or she will never forgive any of us! Because whether or not **you** approve, she loves him. Okay?”

“And so do you,” Bellamy shot back.

“What?” Clarke was caught utterly off-guard by this sudden pronouncement.

“Love him,” Bellamy said. “You love him, too.”

Clarke nearly flinched. How in the hell had Bellamy made that sound like an accusation of wrongdoing? Of course she loved Roan. He’d been the only other adult in the world. He’d been her friend and her confidant, her touchstone for sanity. As she’d been his. Together with Madi they’d pulled each other through the last four years by willpower and determination and, yes, fuck them all, love. “Of course I love him! He’s not really the kind of man you can be indifferent about. Love or hate is all you get. I chose love!”

Bellamy nodded once. “That’s what I thought. Danny... well, he must have been kind of a shock.”

“Danny?” Clarke’s head was spinning trying to keep up with Bellamy’s abrupt conversational shifts. “Well, yeah. Shock is an understatement, don’t you think? Danny’s an impossibility, and yet here he is! And I’ve never seen Roan this happy. I didn’t know he could be!”

Bellamy’s face and voice softened with sympathy. “It’s okay, Clarke. I think understand now.”

"Bellamy?" Clarke had no idea what he could possibly understand because she understood nothing. "I don’t know what you’re...”

But he cut her off with a quick nod. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep our concerns away from Madi. I’ll see to it.”

Clarke trailed after Bellamy as they made their way back to the group, feeling angry and uncomfortable and ill-used, and more than anything else, deeply wishing she could allow herself a good cry.

Madi was sitting next to Raven, clearly aligning herself with the tiny ‘pro-Roan’ faction. She was also refusing – arms crossed and eyes staring resolutely at the distant horizon – to look at anyone else.

Clarke slowed her steps still further, trying to decide how to find some neutral territory without further upsetting Madi, and wondering how in the nine circles of hell she’d ended up in this situation, when a new distraction arrived. Roan and his son were coming back down the ramp. Before Danny could work up too much speed, Roan cautioned him, “slow down.”

Danny promptly checked his pace. He dropped to a very deliberate walk, while flashing a self-conscious smile up at Roan. As soon as he hit dirt, of course, he was running. “Mama! We’re going to make a map! Of the _Gryphon_ , and the lake, and the Rover and the fire pit!”

Which was exactly what they did while the rest finished readying the evening meal. Roan and his son sat at the table Raven had put up that morning. Together they drew several maps and illustrations of the camp, all of which were exclaimed over many times by everyone else while they ate their supper.

Before Danny could get too restless afterwards, Madi said, “I think I’ve figured out how to beat you on that farmyard game. Rematch?”

As soon as the kids were gone, Roan leaned forward and looked around the circle.

He waited until he had everyone’s attention and then began to speak. His voice was pitched low and was particularly rough, adding authority and just a hint of threat to his words. “I understand there’s been some concern that I might beat my son, even for minor accidents or rule-breaking?”

An uncomfortable silence greeted this declaration. Clarke had seen Madi with her head close to Roan’s earlier, her arms waving in the air, and had known Madi was pouring out her complaints.

Roan gentled his voice, sitting back and letting his fingers brush briefly against Raven’s leg before he clasped his hands lightly over his own knees. “I can imagine how strange it would be if Madi’s natural parents walked in out of the wild one day. How concerned Clarke and I would be. How hard it would be for us, how impossible, after six years, to step back and let her go.”

He paused to look at Clarke. She dropped her eyes, gave the smallest of nods. Not wanting to interrupt his flow. Because good gods above, that would tear her apart, to have Madi’s parents appear out of nowhere. How impossible not to be joyful for Madi. How impossible not to grieve for herself.

That he’d even made the connection was his gift. It was why, in a different world, he might have made a pretty fine king.

“So I’m not asking you to.”

“But I am asking you to judge me based on what I do, not rumors about what kind of fathers other Azgeda men might have been, before ALIE burned the world away.” He glanced at Echo. She dropped her eyes. “Those men are gone. The man I was then is gone.”

He turned his head, reaching up to trace the nearly vanished crescent that curved from his temple to below his cheekbone, nothing but a pale hairline scratch now, impossible to see unless you were really looking. “Quite literally burned away. My skin blistered very badly in the acid rain, and again in the radiation storms. When it healed, my scars were gone.”

“Whatever discipline methods our people used, that world is no more. Not that I liked them much anyway. Being beaten did nothing for me but make me resentful and angry. I assume it was similar for those of you who faced the same?” He looked around, and collected a series of short nods. Harper held his gaze the longest, angry and untrusting, but in the end even she yielded.

“It’s been good to learn other ways to teach children,” he continued. “Not always easy. Sometimes frustrating. I know Clarke sometimes despaired of me.”

“No.” Clarke waved this away.

His expression was gently mocking.

“A few times,” she conceded with a wry smile.

“And I wasn’t always very patient with what I thought were the failings of her method.”

“Or just my failings,” she said lightly.

“Plenty of those to go around.” He met her rueful smile with one of his own.

Roan looked back at the members of the _Gryphon's_ crew. “Danny is smart, and curious, and loving. And I don't want to change any of those things. Least of all out of some allegiance to a theory of obedience through violence that was a bad idea in the first place. We had a century to remake the world after the first Priamfaya. Learn from our mistakes. Make humanity better, or at least different. Instead we just made ourselves the same, but worse. It is long past time to try something new. We can begin at home. With our own children.”

There was a moment of faintly stunned silence.

Then, with the strangest look of confusion on her face and her hand pressing in low and on the left side of her belly, Raven said, “I think I just spontaneously ovulated.”

“I think everyone here just spontaneously ovulated,” Murphy drawled. “Good thing everyone here with a uterus has an IUD.”

That startled a burst of uncomfortable laughter from nearly everyone, Clarke included. Though she didn’t have an IUD and she suddenly wondered if maybe, on her long list of worries for another day, she ought to note that down. How long did those old birth control implants last? Did the radiation make difference? The nightblood? If Harper had decided to double up like that, maybe she should to?

And then Raven was kissing Roan, or Roan was kissing Raven. Either way she ended up more or less in his lap.

Clarke looked up from watching Raven and Roan and caught Bellamy’s eyes and smiled tentatively at him. She received only a small deliberate nod in return, not even the smallest of lifts of a smile.

She looked away and wondered if she’d ever be able to read him again. If she’d ever read him as well as she’d once dreamed that she had.

The group broke up not too long after that. In part, the moment was over. Roan had said his piece and there was really nothing more interesting that could come after that.

More important, however, the weather was changing. It had started to haze over in the early evening, and with the setting sun, the clouds now covered up most of the stars and hid the moonlight. The breeze was picking up now, and there was lightning on the horizon.

Clarke helped with the rest as they cleared away the day’s accumulated furnishings and tools, restoring them to their various homes in the _Gryphon’s_ clever storage bins and lockers. Discussion of watching a movie in the small open crew area, where the kids played video games, came to nothing. Before long, the children had gone to sleep and almost everyone else had drifted off to their various berths.

She lingered, waiting for her opportunity, and finally saw Bellamy coming out of the galley. Clarke rose and headed toward him, determined to seize the moment.

Given everything that was happening - her anxieties, her steadily pinging sense that events would soon overtake them, not to mention everyone’s unwanted advice - Clarke had decided she had no choice but to go for blunt.

“Hey. We should talk. We haven’t really yet, and there’s so much we need to share with each other.”

Her little speech was pressing at her throat.

_“Bellamy, I’ve been dreaming of building a future with you for six years. I still want that, but if that’s not what you want for yourself, then please, tell me now, and I’ll move on.”_

But it was stuck. She couldn’t… she couldn’t just blurt it out while he was standing outside door to the head! That couldn’t possibly be the right setting for big emotional confessions.

She could at least get him to sit with her at the banquette table, right?

“I spoke to everyone,” he said. “You don’t need to worry. They’ll be mindful about Madi. Besides, I think Roan did a fine job speaking up for himself. There really isn’t anything more we need to say on the subject.”

“That’s good. Really good. Thank you. But there’s still other,” she failed for a word, settled haplessly for, “stuff, don’t you think? Couldn’t we just sit awhile?”

She gestured a little weakly at the bench, feeling a bit unnerved by his cool demeanor.

“Is there?” He tilted his head, and gazed at her. His feet didn’t move at all. “About what? Your family? I think it’s all very clear how you fit together, what and who your priorities are.”

His eyes were so deep and dark Clarke thought she could very well drown just staring at him. She jerked herself out of that tempting fugue state and said, with a rush, “No! About you! And me! We missed so much together these last six years, there was so much I wanted to tell you, every day. That I did tell you every day, only you never heard it…”

“We spent two days talking in the Rover, catching up. What else is there left to say?”

“Two days when you were covering up Danny’s entire existence. That was not free and open conversation, Bellamy.”

“It was a promise to Raven.”

“I know! I get that. But it meant… there was so much you didn’t talk about.”

She looked hopefully at the table again, then back to Bellamy.

He just shrugged, and his feet didn’t move. “Not really. Space was boring, Clarke. Not much happened.”

“Raven had a baby! You built the _Gryphon_!”

Bellamy smiled wryly. “And that pretty much covers it.”

Clarke wanted to rake her hands through her hair. It was like talking through a wall. Or to one.

He cocked his head. “Unless, there was something you held back, too? Something about your life with Roan and Madi that you wanted to tell me?”

“No,” Clarke frowned. That seemed like a bizarre follow up to her. How much more transparent could they be? “It’s just like I keep saying. And I know Roan told you, and Madi, too. I found Madi, then we found Roan. We made a life for ourselves in the Green, took care of each other, and waited for you all to come home. Hoping that once you did, we could figure out a way to get everyone out of the bunker together.”

“Okay.” He folded his arms, and hunching his shoulders and rocking on his feet he nodded a few times. “Okay. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is. You built your life and it was good. I’m really glad for you.” He met her eyes with a weak smile that faded quickly.

Clarke felt the ground eroding under her feet, metaphorically speaking, and she starting scrambling, saying anything that came into her head. “I do know we’re not in sync right now, you and me. And I feel like events are starting to pick up. The _Eligius_ is here. Everything is different now. Things are coming. Big things. Bad things. We need to get back on the same…how we were. Before. Partners. Friends.”

He blinked, drawing a veil across his feelings, and looked away. “I’m not up for this tonight, Clarke.”

And there it was. Again.

The agony of a phantom blow to the heart. Clarke struggled to keep from actually gasping in reaction.

Bellamy sensed something, because he gentled his voice and offered, “I think I’m still recovering from weeks of hard travel after years in space. I’m going to turn in.” He even reached out and lightly brushed his fingertips across her elbow. “See you in the morning. We’ll get our working groove back. I’m your friend, Clarke. And your partner, in this and in whatever you need.” He even worked up another smile. “Always.”

He slipped into his berth and the door slid closed behind him.

And she’d blown it. Just like that. It was over. Six years of hopes and dreams all come to nothing because it turned out that Bellamy… didn’t believe in them, in her and him, any more. If he ever really had at all. If he’d ever thought of her as anything but a friend and a partner in the struggle to survive.

She really thought she ought be bursting into a frenzy of agonized sobs right about now … but she wasn’t.

She was numb.

Probably because the shock was still so new. So sudden. The hurt would come later, she thought. When she wasn’t expecting it. When it was unwelcome. When she didn’t have the time and safety to let it flow over her.

With nothing else to do, Clarke eventually crawled into bed herself.

She lay awake for a long time. She listened to the children’s gentle breathing while the storm rolled closer. She also made plans. Drew up lists. Organized her thoughts. Focused on the big picture. On what her life was going to be now that she knew.

They'd been completely wrong, Raven and Roan. So caught up in their own brilliant romantic glow, they just assumed that it extended to everyone around them. But it didn’t.

Bellamy wasn’t waiting for her to open up. To speak plainly of her feelings. For an opportunity to share his own. He didn’t want to hear it.

Bellamy didn’t love her like that, and he didn’t want any messy confession from her to embarrass either one of them.


End file.
